


Sea, Swallow Me

by siebilant



Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Breathplay, Brief mention of suicide attempt, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Kidnapping, Miscarriage, Older Man/Younger Woman, Slow Burn, Spanking, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:14:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 42,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28425318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siebilant/pseuds/siebilant
Summary: Javier Peña will soon find out that the road to ruin is paved with good intentions.
Relationships: Javier Peña/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 43
Kudos: 103





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Totally AU. Don't mind me, just borrowing characters here.

The day they came, the air was hot and oppressive; a tropical heat that clung to the body, the humidity near thick enough to snatch from the sky in fistfuls, like cotton batting. It was summer, when the days stretched on for miles, the sun hanging low overhead, peachy-hued, swollen-bellied. The birds were loud in the trees, a persistent, repetitive note, like a warning of something impending, something they could see just beyond the horizon, their sound reverberating up through the hills. She inclined her ear to it, but didn’t speak the language. 

In her garden, she crouched barefoot in the soil, low, sitting into her heels, the gauzy fabric of her sundress pooling between her knees, trailing behind her, blanketing a squat little row of strawberry plants. She tended to her bell peppers, doting like a mother on the gleaming bunches of them, hanging like Christmas ornaments in shades of red, yellow, orange and green, thriving in the direct sunlight; used a small pair of shears to harvest what was ripe, to trim back withered leaves and overgrowth, dropping her bounty into a basket at her feet. Sweat gathered on her brow, in the darkest niches of her body, bare beneath the lightweight fabric of the dress; an opportunist ant venturing its way up the rounded protrusion of an ankle bone.

It was midafternoon and the hacienda was quiet; that hollowed out, eerie vacantness right before five o’clock, where the staff puttered around, aimless, lingering long in the air conditioning, under the pendulous rotations of ceiling fan blades. She could hear the quiet press of the ocean against the shore, a muffled-out, rhythmic sweeping, a whispered promise. She knew that she should go inside, wash the dirt from her feet, scrub the soil from under her fingernails; knew that Alejandro was home from Medellin, that she was not to come to the dinner table in such a state. Between the rows of verdant green, the lattices and stakes driven into the ground like scaffolding to support the weight of overburdened stalks, she could see Nick sitting out on the patio, ankle crossed over knee, uniformed in slacks and a collared shirt, sweating in it, pretending to read something on his phone. Watching her. 

His gaze flicked momentarily upward, angled over the sun-warmed crown of her head, and there were mere moments that stretched out like practical decades, in retrospect, in which she was able to identify the spread of _terror_ through the dark of his eyes, before the absolute _chaos_ swept in. 

In roars like a battle cry, the stillness and the quiet sanctity of the hacienda were torn asunder by bellowing voices of both English and Spanish, of _‘DEA!’_ and _‘Policia!’_ of _‘Get on the fucking ground!’_ and _‘Acuestate!’_ They flooded in around the sides of the finca and over the surrounding concrete wall, brandishing automatic weapons with scopes, some suited in military green, some in the full black of the national police. Nick was driven to his knees, forced face down onto the ground, the nose of a rifle between his shoulder blades, iPhone screen shattered beneath the crunch of a steel-toed boot. 

“You’re standing in my fucking strawberries,” was what found its way out of her mouth, unbidden, as she stood to face the officer whose gun was trained on her heart, boots planted wide, carelessly, trampling her garden. Maybe at that point she had forgotten fear. 

The air went out of her in a wounded, choking gasp as he thrust the butt of his gun into her stomach, hand at the scruff of her neck, thrusting her to the ground, heaving for breath like a caught fish, gutted on the deck, pulling for air. Boot planted in the center of her shoulder blades, he yanked her wrists together behind her back, zip-tied them together. 

There was a constant, recycling feed of adrenaline, running through every body on the property, a kind of shared high, and she felt outside of herself, even as the pain in her gut tried to ground her. The voices weren’t registering, neither the Spanish nor English, so that she wondered if everyone had collectively shifted to a third, alien language. Until she heard it, loud and clear:

_‘House is clear! We got him!’_


	2. II

The interrogation room was what every television cliché had promised it to be – walled in concrete, the only light a low, persistently buzzing fluorescence, table metal, chairs metal, squares of water-stained particle board tiling the ceiling, cameras winking red in all four corners, an unavoidable eye. 

_‘You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to represent you.’_

There were no Miranda rights in Colombia. 

They had promised her nothing, pushing her down into a chair and slicing the zip-tie that bound her wrists, that had worn into the skin there until it bled, a manacle like razor wire, the long, winding drive from the hacienda, into the city. She sat, in the cold of the room, in the oppressive silence, awaiting the forthcoming blow, awaiting her doom, dirt still on her face and the front of her dress from being held down in the garden. 

Where being naked beneath her dress had felt ethereal, an earthy essentialism, with her feet dug down into rich soil, enrobed by sunlight; the unprotected press of her nipples, hard from the chill of the room, against the gauze of the fabric, now felt lurid, made her feel ugly and frail, like a hyena, shoulders rounded in protectively, like she was being crushed into a diamond. 

Her thoughts were as dry, bleached colorless, as the concrete of the walls. It occurred to her that she might’ve been in shock, something low-level, but which had flipped all systems into auto-pilot. She could focus only on the immediate, on her body in the chair, on the temperature of the room. The past and the future had become imaginary, other-world scenarios which did not concern her, could not reach her. 

Her stomach hurt; she knew that much, an ache which had spread clear around to her back, gripping there like a pair of hands _rending_. It was an insistent, almost measured cramping sensation, lower, even, than she’d been hit. Internal bleeding was likely not out of the question, but requesting medical attention almost certainly was. 

Pushing the pain into a manageable corner of her mind, cordoning it off, she sat like a sunken stone, and she waited.

They came into the room, one after the other, in directly opposing coloring. Foils of one another. One lanky and blonde, fair facial hair and fairer eyes, a lucent, cornflower blue; the other shorter, slightly, stockier, with dark hair and eyes, skin like honey, Hispanic. Neither looked friendly – their eyes were harsh, expressions void of anything to identify with, anything to appeal to, the kind of closed-down demeanor, tight like a fist, that one developed like a callous, from wear over time. 

They sat down across from her, staring her down like prey backed into a corner, trapped, watching her eyes as they flashed between their faces. An extended, weighty silence intended to make her squirm, motivate her to speak just to end it. 

“Would you like something to drink? Water, a can of soda?” the darker haired one eventually asked her, in Spanish. Perfect Spanish, natively accented, but not Colombian, not as she’d come to identify it. Peculiar. Neither wore the badge of the national police, the uniform.

She shook her head. If she was thirsty, she could not have identified it, not apart from the pain in her gut.

“I’m Agent Peña, and this is my partner, Agent Murphy,” his introducing them both made her wonder whether Agent Murphy spoke only English. She stared at him harder – while he had traces of a tan, on the high planes of his face, he was definitely white. He was decently attractive, the kind of golden boy good looks that set hometown hearts aflutter. “We’re from the DEA. I presume you know what that is.” 

So they were _Americans_. It struck her as rhetorical, his presumption that she knew what DEA stood for, so she didn’t respond. 

“Luciana – do you go by Luci?” he asked, the name mellifluous on his tongue, honeyed. He had a mustache – it fit his face, but it also made her focus on his mouth when he talked, rapt.

It took the same measured beat that it always took, to process that someone was referring to _her_ when they spoke that name. She considered it, then shook her head. _Did_ anyone ever call her Luci? No, it was always _muñequita_ and _cariña_ , _nena_ and _preciosa_ , in voices soft as a brush of velvet. 

“Luciana, do you understand what happened today? Do you know why you’re here right now?”

She just stared into his eyes – they were tremendously dark, eyes like pitch. Completely inscrutable. Did _he_ know why she was here right now? Could he possibly? 

“The raid today was an effort carried out by the DEA and the Colombian police to arrest your husband on drug trafficking charges, so that he can be extradited to the United States.” 

He had a very Roman nose, aquiline, like something carved into a statue, later lost to the wear and waste of time. A fairly sharp chin, squared off from his jaw. In profile, his features must have been devastatingly beautiful. 

She felt, between her legs, a not unfamiliar, but decidedly unpleasant sensation. A gathering, an atypical warmth, a _slide_. It was late – she’d been awaiting it, checking a calendar. Likely should have guessed it would happen now, at the least opportune moment. That explained, then, the feeling like her insides were being wrung out, twisted by unseen hands.

“I need to go to the restroom,” she said, interrupting Agent Peña’s explanation of how it was they’d come to detain her there, in that room, where she was now sitting, impossibly, in a pool of her own blood. It never came this _fast_ , it occurred to her then. The first day was usually only light spotting. Something wasn’t right. 

“We need to ask you a few questions,” Agent Peña told her, patient, soft, a longsuffering father’s tone. Nonetheless, in answer, a ‘no.’

“I need to go now,” she insisted, interrupting him again, a hitch in her voice. She was flush, sweat standing out on her body, gelling in the air conditioned cool of the room. It hurt in a way that was _wrong_ , that was _sharp_ , that made her stomach turn. 

He sighed heavily, leaning back in his chair, calling out into the ether, to those listening just beyond the room, for a female officer to bring her to the restroom.

“Peña,” Agent Murphy nudged his partner as she rose from the chair, gripping the edge of the table like a lifeline. Blood. He saw the blood, skating a path all the way down the inside of her ankles. 

“¿Estás bien?”

“Are you okay?”

A more severe cramp ripped through her, sent her to her knees on the concrete. She didn’t make it to the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know shit about the DEA, or about anything, for that matter, so if anything is patently incorrect, my sincerest oops.


	3. III

She drifted in and out of sleep, a nebulous place of rounded edges; a bleary, quiet space where she was _alone_ – shadows that shimmered at their very edge moved across the slivered plane of her vision, but she was not there, not really, and so neither were they. They passed through one another like smoke.

When she finally woke, though, there was _him_. 

In a chair pulled up to her bedside, leaning back, legs crossed, a leather padfolio open on his knee. He wore a red tie, loose at his throat. His gringo partner was with him, just outside the room, talking to the police officer stationed outside her door, whose rifle lay naked in his hands. A familiar sight to her, maybe, but she wondered at whether the various others, moving down the hospital’s fluorescent-lit, antiseptic hallways, chasing the healing, knew it as well. In the city, perhaps they did. 

She hated hospitals. 

They came unbidden, the thoughts of pungent smelling oils and purified crystals, magic crystals that never made things any better, healing poultices of eucalyptus, aloe, and lavender. A voice that murmured, deathly soft, _give it to me, instead. I know what to do with it_. And corruption, bone deep corruption. She didn’t want to remember. _How_ could she have forgotten, for even a moment?

“I’m sorry,” Agent Peña said, interrupting the horrible reel in her mind. He spoke to her in Spanish, still. 

She realized then she’d been staring into his eyes the entire time, sunken into them, the warmth of them, which he let her see now; a true, human warmth. Someone was, indeed, at home. He must have read it in her eyes, that she was bewildered by his apology, unclear what it was for. 

“For your loss,” he clarified. 

_Oh_. 

It could’ve meant a few things, still, but he didn’t have to explain. He meant the miscarriage. The doctor had told her that she’d been only a few weeks along; that the intervening causes of trauma to her abdomen and the stress of her entire world going up in flame hadn’t given the fetus much of a chance. So. That was that. Gone before it was even a thing to be acknowledged. She didn’t know how to feel, if to feel, so she didn’t. How could she mourn something that had never been hers to begin with? There was a yawning nothingness, in the space where the feeling should have been. Another way her mind would protect her, constructing its own scaffolding to hold things together. 

Seeing that she was awake, Agent Murphy came back into the room. He pulled up another chair, sat down beside Peña, who watched her watch him enter, scrutinizing her gaze, reading her every move. 

“We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you feel up to it,” Peña said. “Do you speak English? My partner isn’t fluent in Spanish.” 

She said nothing, staring past them, out the window. Her room faced another wing of the hospital, so there was nothing in the way of a view, even. Sunlight, though, crept in through the blinds, crawled over her in bed. It was daytime, then. There was a peculiar slide to the hours in this place, making it more difficult to tell up from down. 

“You know, I noticed something interesting yesterday,” he eventually continued speaking, when the silence between them stretched out too long to bear, “You speak Spanish very well, but with an accent. English is your first language, isn’t it? I wonder how that could possibly be, what with both of your parents being native Colombian. No sign on your passport that you’ve ever been in the states, but your accent is Americanized. Explain that to me.”

“Television,” she replied placidly, unmoved by this already tired game. There was nothing they could have from her – she had nothing to give. She was barren now, scooped clean. 

“Television,” he repeated, like ‘ _of course_ ,’ like ‘ _no fucking way_ ,’ turning to Murphy, giving him the subtlest of signals, the barest nod, to which he responded by getting up and heading to the door, poking his head out of it, motioning someone in. 

“Here’s what I think,” Peña said, in English now, as she watched a nurse come into the room, wheeling a phlebotomy cart, lined with vials. An omen in scrubs. A male nurse – tall and broad in hair gel and Nike sneakers, with dark, thick arm hair. She could tell he’d come prepared for a fight, so she resolved not to. “I think you’re not who you say you are. Because you know what, the further we look into it, the more apparent it becomes that Luciana Herrera doesn’t really _exist_.” 

“If you’re in CODIS, we’re going to find you,” Agent Murphy said, speaking, it seemed, for the first time, as a swab was forced into her mouth, sweeping the inside of her cheek, collecting DNA. He had a southern-sounding accent, the quintessential American cop – the bad cop, the hard ass. He was more officer, or deputy, than he was agent, but she could see why he’d probably been selected by the agency. There was a tenacity in him, bold in the blue of his eyes, that spoke of a relentlessness, an unwillingness to fail. “Might as well just tell us.” 

She could and would say nothing more. Silence was second nature, something to cleave to in doubt. She tried to remember whether, in America, a cheek swab required a warrant. But that didn’t really matter, did it? 

-

She dreamt, that night, of giving birth to a baby with no face.


	4. IV

She was sitting up in bed, eating green Jell-O, when they came in. She’d been nauseous the whole morning, throwing up bile into a plastic bag held open by a hard plastic ring, holding it like a gross accessory, watching soaps on the television in the corner of the room, the rapid, histrionic Spanish a comforting hum. The pregnancy hormones were still in her system, the nurses had told her, approaching her with caution, like an animal known to bite, so she might continue to experience morning sickness for a few days more. 

She didn’t think it was morning sickness. She didn’t say so.

“No hits in CODIS,” Agent Murphy announced from the foot of her bed. They were still speaking to her in English; exactly that confident, apparently, in their suspicions of her. She wondered at his posture – he seemed… _rabid_ , an excitable dog with a bone. “Luci, Jane Doe, whoever the hell you are.”

“They’re discharging you this afternoon,” Agent Peña said, with a lilt that turned the statement into as much of a question. He was as even as ever, unwavering in his lack of expression. “Feeling better?”

It seemed a silly question. She let it linger, let it fall between them like a balloon out of air. Feeling better than _what_? Than she’d felt with fetal tissue sloughing from her womb? 

“We’ve been talking to Nick,” Murphy announced – they both watched her face carefully, like a mood ring, waiting for the shift. “He was able to provide us with some very useful insight.” This explained, then, the agent’s sunny disposition. 

“He said he thinks the baby might’ve been his,” Peña said, “You’ve been sleeping together behind Alejandro’s back for almost a year, right? Planning to run away together?” They let this revelation percolate, gave her time to scream, or cry, or gnash her teeth. When she did nothing, they continued to prod. 

“Boy, he does not like your husband,” Murphy chuckled, a little gauche, given the context, a little obvious. “But he really does seem to care about you – eager as hell to clear your name, at least. Honestly, that was never really the issue. What we need is to know who you are – who you _really_ are, so that we can figure out if who you really are is actually married to Alejandro Herrera.”

“You think I’ll testify?” she asked, as she realized it, the point they were driving at. Spousal privilege didn’t exist, in the states, absent a valid marriage certificate. They’d abandoned, then, the image of her as some cartel boss-woman. She had found it laughable, in all honesty, that they’d ever considered her a suspect to begin with. But perhaps she wasn’t giving herself enough credit – after all, exactly how hard could drug trafficking be? Why _couldn’t_ she have been capable of it? Apart from a deeply patriarchal culture, what would have stood in her way? Moral fiber?

“If you’re not married, you won’t have a choice,” Peña explained, “Unless you want to be held in contempt.” Something that he read in her expression made him continue, “We can protect you from him, you know. I promise you.”

At this she laughed, a harsh, inappropriate burst of sound. “Just a little piece of advice – build your case around something else.”


	5. V

Peña came back a handful of hours later, when the spill of light through the gaps in the blinds had gone all honeyed and soft. Just him, with a look in his eye that made her chest tight, made her scan for an exit, knowing there wasn’t one. There was an uncanny tenderness to that look that had no business being there. She would have taken Agent Murphy’s quiet, indignant rage over _this_ any day of the week. This she could not bear. 

He sat down at her bedside, and she knew she was completely fucked. Knew Nick had completely fucked her. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked. His voice was low and rich with something like sympathy. She hated him. Hated him and that fucking insufferable mustache. 

“I don’t know what he fucking told you, but…” she said through gritted teeth, a fine, just noticeable vibrato of fear in her voice. She could turn it around – she would find a way to turn it around, to go back. Back to the garden, back before all of this. 

“He told us you’re American,” he interrupted her to answer. “That Herrera abducted you at sixteen. That he forced you to marry him, and brought you into the country under a fake identity. Nick isn’t sure who you used to be, except that your name is Sarah, not Luci. You let us think that you were an accomplice, when really, you’re a victim. Why?” 

“That’s not true,” she practically barked, teeth gritted, a feeling growing inside her, hideous and black, crowding out her guts. “He has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. Did he tell you he’s only been _employed_ by Alejandro for a year? How would he know anything about me?”

“I told you, Sarah, we can protect you from Herrera,” he insisted, leaning in close on the edge of his chair, speaking to her low, trying to manufacture affiliation, trying to make her believe that it was _them_ against _him_ , that he was in some way doing this for _her_ , “He’s going away for the rest of his life, and you can help us put him there. With these additional charges, he’ll never see the light of day again. Don’t you want to go home?” 

“Additional charges?” she demanded, bewildered. Her chest was tightening, breath short, hands and arms beginning to tingle. It was like her ribcage was a vice, ratcheting in tighter and tighter until every breath was a painful gasp. He couldn’t possibly mean…

“Human trafficking,” he explained, like it was obvious, went without saying. 

“You might as well just fucking kill me yourself,” she bit out through gritted teeth, angry tears burning behind her eyes. 

“Sarah, witness protection is really…” there was a roaring in her ears, like sizzling ocean water had risen up to fill them, hollowing and distorting his voice as he extolled the virtues of the WPP. 

She saw her window closing, saw that there was no changing his mind, and lunged for the gun at his hip, knowing she’d never free it from its holster, but hoping, just hoping, he’d be dumb enough, threatened enough, to draw on her, to consider ending it all there, before things could spiral anymore wildly out of control. 

A nurse pushed her way in the door then, interrupting them both – her yawning fingers, reaching for the gun, his hand coming up to seize her wrist, to hold it back. The nurse ignored the conflict playing itself out before her, not unlike a telenovela on screen, making a beeline for the heart rate monitor, which Sarah realized now was chiming loudly, signaling an abrupt change in her heart rate. A panic attack, she thought. She was having a panic attack. Acknowledging it, giving it a name, only gave it air, made it billow wider, made it harder to breathe. 

The nurse silenced the alarm and chastised Peña harshly in Spanish for whatever it was he’d done to set off her patient, all while pushing a syringe full of something directly into Sarah’s IV that made her feel like a lead blanket had fallen over her, flattening her to the hospital bed, reaching hands left to lay like starved spiders, curled at her sides.

The last thing she saw, her consciousness slipping away like the drop of a screen, was the false, saccharine tenderness leaving Peña’s eyes, replaced by something harder, more hateful.


	6. VI

She was released the next morning into police custody, clad in donated scrubs and an awkward mesh diaper, like the kind for women who’ve just given birth. Unlike those women, she left the hospital empty-handed. The bleeding had tapered off, but not totally – her dress was ruined, binned on arrival. The most they could give her in the way of shoes was a pair of thick socks with rubber grips stamped out all over the bottom, which she supposed would suffice, as she was wheeled directly from the hospital into the back of an awaiting black Tahoe with pitch-dark window tint, feet scarcely touching the ground.

The plan, as it had been relayed to her, en español, by the officer designated to stand guard outside her room, allowed inside at last to retrieve her, was that she would be transported to a DEA safe house, where she would stay, closely monitored, until she could be transported back to the United States. There, her options had been explicitly laid out for her: testify or be jailed. 

Perhaps she was simple to think so, but of what difference was it to her, to trade one prison for another?

Out the window, she watched city streets streak past, taking everything in, every food stall, every lavandería, every corner paleta cart. The people and the cars and the bikes weaving between, the colors of everything, muted by the tint of the windows. Drank it all down, committing every detail to memory, locking it all up inside, in case it was the last time she ever saw it. 

Around twenty minutes into their journey, the officer in the passenger seat answered a phone call, a terse conversation which unfolded something like: 

“Lopez. ¿Que pasó? Dios mío. Si. Si. Si. Bueno.” 

After ending the phone call, he proceeded, in rapid Spanish, to direct the driver to take a different route. The driver asked for, and was denied, an explanation. Probably, she thought, because _she_ was not entitled to know the reason for the sudden reroute. Whatever it was, they eventually arrived outside a single family home – basic, white stucco, small rose garden up against the front porch. She couldn’t have drawn a picture of what she’d expected the safe house to look like, but it certainly wasn’t this.

She was directed to head inside, unaccompanied. She supposed it would undermine the whole purpose of it being a safe house, were uniformed police officers to be seen outside flashing badges in the light of day. However, she didn’t exactly look much more _normal_ , trudging up the walk in scrubs and hospital socks. 

She let herself in the front door like a latchkey kid, stood in the high sunlight of the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the lamplight dim of the room. Her gut felt hollowed out – there was a taste of fear, at the very back of her tongue, but for the most part, she felt empty, a hole punched through the very center of her, whistling as the air passed through.

“Shut the door. Come sit,” Agent Murphy directed her, sitting cross-legged in an armchair facing the door, a mug of coffee in hand, curling with steam, scenting the room.

She nudged the door shut, crossed to the sofa. The furnishing was modest, inoffensive. The walls were painted an eggshell white, the carpets a high, dark brown pile. There was a tell – something in the lack of any personal effects, any kitsch or clutter, that belied that no one truly lived here. She stared into the silent, dark screen of the switched off TV, and she waited. 

A door opened, somewhere deeper into the house, then came the sound of shoes moving over tile, and Peña appeared through the open arch of the doorway, leading into the kitchen. He must’ve come in from the garage – she could hear the mechanical, grinding whir of its closing through the living room wall. 

“DOA,” he said to Murphy, a private address, not acknowledging her presence there, perched uncomfortably on the floral-patterned couch, overlarge knees of her scrubs bunched up in her fists, “You tell her?” 

Murphy shook his head, the two of them still maintaining eye contact, passing volumes without words, watching her only in periphery. There wasn’t much to see. There was a stretch of silence between them that felt nothing like silence. Every single breath was a code, a message, a language; one she didn’t speak and couldn't begin to keep up with. 

“Sarah,” Peña began. In a way it was blasphemous, hearing her name on his lips. He had no right to her name, no right to address her like he had a clue. “The safe house we intended to bring you to was raided earlier this afternoon,” there was a look in his eye she couldn’t decipher. Heavy, but empty. “Nick was gunned down – we assume they intended to prevent him from testifying.”

It seemed the DEA’s arrival, that too-perfect, too-still afternoon, had set in motion something unstoppable – the first domino to fall. And that they would continue to fall, one after the other, all in a row, until the very last. 

“I’m sorry,” he added, a manufactured, false warmth that made her stomach turn itself inside out.

She held his gaze for as long as she could, forcing him to look into her eyes, to read the resounding emptiness there – it echoed back to her, like a mirror. It was as if each new revelation, each new blow, simply dropped like a stone into the well of herself, never reaching the bottom, just careening down into pure emptiness. A soaring, out of control freefall. The only tell was the whiteness of her knuckles, still fisted at her knees, a fine crack in the artifice. 

“We’ll be keeping a 24-hour watch,” Murphy assured her, “And there’ll be officers patrolling every half-hour, so there’s no need to worry.”

Worry. No, worry was not the word, did not even begin to touch it, what was going on inside her mind. No word existed for it, in her language or theirs, that emotion. It was something primal, essential, the very first feeling, something set off at the inception of the earth that just kept echoing back. 

“The plan is to transport you back to the states as soon as practicable. It’ll be much harder for them to get to you there.” Peculiar, that wording – ‘much harder,’ a purposely conservative estimate. They would not promise her anything more definite. They must’ve known the beast they were dealing with even better than they had let on.


	7. VII

‘ _You let her go in there alone? With the door locked?_ ’

She just scarcely picked up on it, the low hum of Peña’s voice, over the thunderous sound of the shower spray against the tile, over the crown of her head, before he was jamming a pin through the lock on the door, popping it open, and lunging into the room, fists enclosing her wrists, squeezing until her fingers involuntarily released, the tiny razor she’d smashed free of a Shick disposable hitting the drain with a small ‘tink.’ 

“Tonta,” he said, in a low huff so familiar that she dissolved into tears, then sobs, all at once, rushing out of her in a wave, buckling her knees, so she would have fallen at his feet had he not held her fast; jagged, wrenching sobs tearing from her chest in a way that hurt. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, as her blood washed from between his fingers, down both of their forearms, pink.

“Let go of me,” she insisted, teeth gritted, attempting to yank her wrists free – he held fast, tighter than he strictly needed to to prevent her. She could feel the bones in her wrists grinding together, could feel the sting of the small nick she’d made before his interruption, throbbing against the manacle of his fingers. 

“Calm down,” he insisted, pulling her in closer, trying to get his arms around her, like he’d squeeze her into submission, somehow, python-like. He was soaked, standing directly under the spray to cage her in, saturating his hair, his suit, his leather shoes. 

“No!” she howled, feral, twisting like mad to free herself. She could scarcely breathe for the sobbing, or even recognize some of the sounds she was making, they were so guttural.

“Calm down,” he insisted again, angry with her, but scared of her, too, she could tell – of the wild, unpredictable, explosive tide of her emotions. Of what she would do, or what he would have to do to stop her. It satisfied her in some way, his fear. She had a measurable effect on another person. She was real. 

She freed a wrist, slapped him, hard, an instant flash of red across his cheek, like she’d painted it. In an instant, he was slamming her up against the shower wall, pinning her wrists behind her back, tight enough and at such an angle that to pull at them in the slightest caused a tearing pain in her shoulder joints, as though he’d pull them from their sockets without hesitation. As though he felt he’d have to. His body was flush with hers, a damp, crushing weight, keeping her still, his knees digging into the backs of her thighs. 

She was trapped, incapable of rending him or herself to pieces, so she did the only thing her body could think to do with the rage instead – she sobbed. Kept sobbing. Hard, awful, a sound like her chest would crack to free something hideous. She wept, and he, against her back, blanketing her in the shower’s spray, in the abundant steam of the room, murmured in her ear that it was _okay_ , to _take it easy, just breathe_. 

After a while, the violence went out of her crying – pressed against her, he could feel the mad tension drain out of her body, and released her wrists once it did. A little hesitant, he stepped back, out of the shower stall, cutting off the water, draping a towel in around her shoulders. Her nudity had not even registered to him, until this very moment. He collected the razor from the floor, then collected the rest of them from the vanity drawer, where they’d been left for her to find. 

“I’ll find a way,” was what she told him, voice hoarse, wrecked by the sobbing, as he turned to leave the bathroom.


	8. VIII

“Hope the clothes fit,” Peña said as she came into the kitchen, hair wet, curling around her shoulders, seeking out a glass of water before bed. “Murphy had no clue what size you’d be.”

She hitched up the waist of the nondescript black sweatpants that had been left out on the bed for her, in a tied-up plastic bag along with socks and underwear and a black t-shirt, a necessity as much as an answer, as the pants began to slip down her hips. “They’re fine.” 

He scoffed, a disbelieving sound, watching her cinch the tie at the waist as tight as possible, wrangle it into a knot. “Looks like it.” He was seated at the kitchen table, tie off, shirt open at his throat, a glass of something amber in hand, clinking with ice. His hair was wet, too, clothes still drying. “Get yourself a glass,” he directed her, “Come sit.”

She complied, but slow, reluctant, taking her time in finding the correct cabinet, selecting a glass, plunking ice cubes down into it. She lowered herself down into the kitchen chair across from his, rigid, like she was lowering herself onto a bed of nails. Talking to him felt like that sometimes, sharp, wounding. 

He unscrewed the cap on a bottle of whiskey, filled her glass with a shallow splash of it. “They found your passport, in the house,” he said. “Your real passport.” 

It hadn’t even occurred to her, that her passport might’ve been something Alejandro would hold onto. Actually, she remembered vividly him telling her he’d destroyed it, just after he’d brought her to Colombia, as one of the many enumerated reasons she would never be able to return to the US. The person she was before him did not exist, and never would again. She was a ghost. But it seemed they were now trying to resurrect her.

“I’m not going to interrogate you,” he said, taking a sip from his glass, “Doesn’t seem like it would get me anywhere if I tried. But I want to know how the hell it happened. How did a sixteen-year-old girl fall in with a sicario of the Medellin cartel? How is there no missing persons report on you? How could you just disappear like that, without anyone noticing?”

She rolled her eyes. She couldn’t even stand to look at his fucking face, the curiosity cloying in his eyes, exploitative, somehow, like he wanted to read her like some trashy gossip magazine. 

“I know about your parents,” he said.

She froze. 

“They died that year. Is that how it happened? He took you in after your parents died?”

“Stop it!” she practically shouted, sweeping her glass from the table with a shattering crash, a reflexive impulse that surprised her as much as it did him. But it stopped him talking. “You don’t think this counts as an interrogation? No matter what you do, you can’t make me answer your fucking questions, so just stop,” she snarled. 

“You can talk to me,” he insisted, perfectly calm, unmoved by her theatrics, even as whiskey dripped down the wall. “It can be off the record.”

“Why don’t you tell me about _you_?” she demanded. “You want me to bear my soul, tell you about the worst things that have ever happened to me, but I don’t even know your fucking name.”

“It’s Javier,” he said, rolling the ‘r’ just slightly, naturally. “I was born in Santiago, Chile. My parents immigrated to the United States when I was five. I grew up in San Antonio, and I went to Texas A & M for college,” he rattled off. These were surface level things, nothing near commensurate with what he was asking her to reveal of herself. Maybe he knew that. Maybe he wasn’t anymore eager to bare his soul than she was.

“How long have you been a cop?” she asked, wondering, even as she did so, whether he’d quibble with her describing him as a “cop.” While some DEA agents were cops at some point in their career, her understanding was that they weren’t always. Some went straight from undergrad to Quantico. 

“About sixteen years,” he replied. He must have been one of them. 

“What made you want to do it?” she asked, the barest curl to her lip belying that his career path was not one she particularly envied. 

“Become a DEA agent?” He clarified. “I’ve seen, firsthand, the evil and the atrocities perpetrated by the cartels – even just the effect they have downstream, on small time dealers and users. I wanted to do whatever I could to put a stop to it. Still want to.”

It sounded a little idealistic to her; a carefully manufactured answer, the kind of starry thing you’d tell kids on career day. She thought her expression must’ve given it away, that she wasn’t particularly won over, because he continued, “Look, I won’t pretend that I totally understand why you refuse to testify – if I was in your shoes, I think I’d want to do whatever I could to put away the bastard that did to me what he did to you. But I want to understand. I’m really trying to.” 

“Just cut the fucking shit, _Javier_. Can you please just do that for me? Just for one minute?” she insisted, leaning forward in her chair, almost across the table, to capture his gaze, “You putting him away isn’t about me. It’s not even about justice, not really. It’s about _you_. It’s about your fucking ego and your fucking career and your ability to sleep at night and I don’t fucking care about _any_ of those things. Okay?” she ranted, almost shaking with the rage, a fine tremor in her voice. “Honestly, at this point, I would spend any length of time in fucking prison just to make sure that you _didn’t_ get what you wanted out of this, even if that meant having my life taken away from me for five more fucking years. I will never provide you, or anyone else, with jerk off fodder about what the fuck he did to me. You can put him away for life on the drug trafficking charges. You know you can. And you know you don’t need me for that, because the proof is in that fucking house, and it’s in every other person who did what he fucking told them to. So just _give it the fuck up_.” 

He stared back at her like it was the first time he was ever seeing her. He did not speak. 

“Thanks for the drink,” she said, standing, pushing her chair back, “Sorry about the clean up.”


	9. IX

She dreamt that night of Nick, of the sweetness of his face, the softness of his lips. Dreamed an almost memory, of a time they had stolen away together, down to the shore in the middle of the night, forging a path through tall grass, through the dunes. But in the dream the moon was massive, hanging low on the horizon, and they treaded water just beneath it, balancing on the edge of the earth. 

Nick’s mouth was moving, but she could hear nothing but the roar of the waves, falling heavy against the shore. His thick eyebrows were drawn down together in consternation, and she reached out to him, to touch his face, as if to feel for the ripples of sound as they spilled from his lips. It felt like putting her hand through the shimmering cool of the water, and then she suddenly realized she _was_ reaching out to him through a massive wave, a surge that sucked them both under the surface, pressing down on them with incredible force. The dark of the water churned around her, filling her ears and blanking out her mind, and she sank deeper and deeper like a stone. Beneath the wave, the ocean was silent, an absolute, deadly quiet, only the sound of her own pulse thudding in her ears. The sea was sucking her down, down where no voices could ever reach her…

From the sandy sea floor, Nick looked up at her, tiny bubbles trapped, clinging to his eyelashes, his lips. He reached out his hand, an awaiting embrace, an immeasurable darkness.

She kicked to the surface, gasping for breath, and woke to a palm pressed over her mouth, fingers digging in at her jaw. In the full press of the dark, she stared up into dark eyes, chest heaving with terror. She didn’t recognize the nightmarish mask that loomed over her, but it took very little time to identify what he was there for. He’d come to take her away. His eyes, like pitch-dark fathoms, communicated volumes as he slowly withdrew his hand – ‘ _scream and I will end you; this is your last chance to live through this_.’

She drew herself silently up out of bed, rigid with fear, allowed him to guide her toward the window, which he’d apparently pried open and crept through. He was some grim version of a pied piper, rousting her out of bed and luring her out into the night. There was no hope whatsoever that anyone would save her – being discovered, interrupted, by Murphy and Peña was not any kind of salvation.

As she jumped down into the grass, letting herself drop down out of the window, into the cool mugginess of the night, the light in the bedroom snapped on, like a beacon, and she heard a shout of, ‘ _Freeze! Drop the weapon! Get down!_ ’ A barrage of repeated, booming commands that went unfollowed, she supposed, because the very next thing she heard was the unmistakable percussion of a shot fired. 

She ran.

An opportunistic bid for freedom, lurching into an all out sprint, bare feet slapping the pavement. She could not look back, not even to determine if anyone was chasing her – if she did, she would certainly turn to a pillar of salt. She turned diagonal, cutting across the side of someone’s yard, to run down the alleys between houses, through sparse, dry grass and around black plastic sacks of trash, weaving down side streets and into small spaces in between buildings that pressed close at either shoulder, a complicated, hopefully impossible to follow track. 

The safe house had been out in the barrio, so the houses were close together or adjoined, single family homes and taller, divided apartment buildings all crammed in together. Most front yards were either paved over patios or hard-packed, rock-studded dirt, all iron gated, walled in. People hung their clothes out to dry on the spires, the colors waving in the breeze like flags as she ran past them. This was the Cartagena she had never been permitted to see, but it was the _real_ Cartagena. 

The hacienda had never been real – it was a fortress of silence that existed outside the truth. Ornate metal gates, Spanish bowers, manicured lawns, armored SUVs lined all the way up the winding driveway. Huge swimming pools, courtyards filled on all sides with succulents and cactus and wild, desert plant-life. Giant rooms filled with gaudy, showy affluence, chandeliers pendulous overhead, dripping crystals. The only real tell were the men, automatic weapons strapped across their chests, prowling the perimeter, standing up on balconies, scanning the horizon, waiting. 

But this, _this_ was the reality. Abject, glaring poverty. Aluminum roofs weighed down by stones. Skinny dogs roaming the streets, digging at trash left out in bags. Roads that turned unexpectedly from pavement to dirt, interrupted.

There was so much wealth in the cartel, and yet it never reached these people. 

As she ran, she felt something slice into the instep of her foot – glass, or a jagged rock, it was impossible to say, in the dark, impossible to figure why something hadn’t cut her before then, running these streets barefoot. She only knew that it _burned_ , a white hot lance. She cried out, lost her balance, leaning in hard against someone’s front yard fence to examine the wound, which was bleeding steadily, the almost black already dripping from her heel in the impenetrable press of the dark. 

A porch light turned on, and she heard someone call into the street, ‘ _Who is it?_ ’ in Spanish, a voice harsh as a hail of gravel. Her instinct was to run, to dart off into the night, to avoid being seen, but she was heaving for air as it was, a cold fire in her lungs as she struggled to catch her breath. And she was bleeding quite badly from the jagged gash in the bottom of her foot. She needed a breather, just a few moments, hunched over, hands on her knees, before she could keep going. 

A very old woman in a cotton night gown came out of the house, onto the porch, to investigate the noise. In Spanish, the woman asked her what she was doing there, squinting at her, suspicious. 

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said, winded, “I hurt my foot.” 

“You shouldn’t be out this late,” the old woman scolded her, as though she were her grandmother and not a stranger, “It isn’t safe out here. Go home to your mother.” 

“Do you have some gauze? Or a bandage?” Sarah requested, voice tight, anxious. It seemed to her every moment she stood there, out in the open, talking to this woman, someone was drawing closer to her, closing in on her, preparing to snatch her up off the street. Who would’ve been worse, the DEA or one of Alejandro’s men, she couldn’t even say. She didn’t want to find out. 

The old woman leaned in closer to the bars of the gate to see her more closely, to identify that she was wounded, bleeding. “What are you doing walking around these streets barefoot? Stupid girl,” she said with a reproach that felt familial, felt like the concern of an abuelita, which made Sarah’s chest tight. She couldn’t answer, couldn’t explain, but the woman didn’t make her, maybe sensing this. “You’ll have to clean that wound. Come,” she unlocked the gate and pulled it slightly open, just enough to admit her. “Quickly,” she hastened her as Sarah took too long to hobble her way, “I’m old and tired. I want to go back to bed.” 

“Thank you,” Sarah thanked the old woman as she motioned for her to sit down in a plastic white lawn chair, up against her house. She sank down into it with mild relief – she would be obscured from the road by the palms growing up against the woman’s gate, so if someone were to drive by, it was likely they wouldn’t even see her. 

“Any funny business and I’ll wake my son – he has a gun,” the old woman warned her as she made her creaky, slow way back into the house for supplies. 

She returned with a small bottle of alcohol, a wad of gauze, a stretchy bandage, and a small pair of flip flops. She’d brought Sarah _shoes_. The gesture made Sarah's throat tight, her eyes sting. “I’m too old to kneel,” the old woman told her, dumping the supplies into her lap, leaving her to dress the wound herself. Slowly, effortfully, the old woman lowered herself down into the chair beside hers. “The shoes are one of my granddaughters’ – they may not fit, but they’ll be better than nothing.” Sarah thanked her, genuinely – she didn’t respond, peering critically at the job Sarah was doing, dabbing delicately at the wound. “Make sure it’s clean – lord knows what you might’ve stepped in, out there.” 

Obedient, Sarah cleaned the wound more thoroughly, gritting her teeth against the sting of the alcohol. 

“What are you running from, blanca?” the old woman asked her, calling her white, identifying her as an outsider even in the dark. Sarah floundered for a bit, frozen, incapable of even conjuring a lie. “If it’s a boyfriend you’re running from,” the woman finally said, “I will only tell you one thing. No matter what he says to you, _never_ go back. Men, they never change.”

“I have nowhere to go,” Sarah said, her voice incredibly small, smaller than she’d ever heard it, as she fastened the bandage tightly around her foot. 

The grandmotherly woman sighed heavily, like the wind, a tired, old sound. “Come inside. You can sleep on the couch. But in the morning, you go. And if you think about stealing anything from me, you remember what I said about my son having a gun.”


	10. X

In the morning, she was prepared to be hustled out the door the very instant she opened her eyes, maybe at gunpoint, if the son had any objection to her presence, but instead, the old woman called her into the kitchen for breakfast. She had prepared eggs, rice and beans, fried plantains, and coffee, and she insisted that Sarah eat, calling her flaquita as she measured the circumference of her wrist with bony fingers, practically pushing her down into a chair. Her son came into the kitchen after a while, regarding Sarah with suspicion, dark eyes narrowed as she sat at their table, eating heartily. 

In a low voice, not low enough, by far, to evade Sarah’s hearing, he asked the old woman where she had found ‘this gringa.’ Then, in response to his mother’s chastising remark that she spoke Spanish, he responded, “I don’t give a damn! Have you considered that this woman might belong to the cartel? That by inviting her in you’re inviting _them_ in?”

The old woman only clucked disapprovingly, a mother hen, still preoccupied at the stove, cooking. Shooting Sarah one last harsh look, the son left the kitchen with a mug of coffee, and she heard, shortly thereafter, the sound of him leaving the house, probably for work. She couldn’t even be offended, or indignant, or justify a thing to herself – he was right. She was putting them in danger just by being there.

She was attempting to respectfully decline a second helping of food when the knock came at the door. Her gut went cold, like a bucket of ice had been dumped into it. The old woman read the terror in her eyes, and told her to stay there, in the kitchen, and finish her breakfast. ‘ _It might just be Rosa_ ,’ she added. ‘ _She always comes over in the morning to tell me the neighborhood gossip_.’ Sarah wanted to believe this, but the feeling in her stomach prevailed, sent her to the backdoor, fleeing like a cockroach in the light.

She opened it, and there he was. 

Peña, standing over her tall, and angry, and triumphant. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but was interrupted as the old woman came back from the front door, where no one had been, and started cursing him and shouting at him for being low down, dirty rotten, abusive scum, so foul he’d driven ‘his woman’ out onto the streets barefoot. Surprising Sarah, he shouted back at the old woman that he would never and had never hurt her, that they’d merely had a disagreement, and that he’d come to bring her back home. By the time the old woman laid into him about how all mankind were dogs, seeking out the youngest women they could find and exploiting them, Sarah interrupted. 

“Abuelita, thank you, it’s okay, he didn’t hurt me,” she said. “I appreciate your hospitality so much, but I should go. We need to talk.” She reached out to touch Peña’s arm, playing the part of scorned girlfriend, apparently surprising him. She imagined he’d expected her to rage, to throw herself down onto the ground, feet kicking, refusing. But what was the use? And what business was it of this woman? As her son had pointed out, Sarah had already brought too much to her door. 

The old woman stared at her for a long time, with shrewd crow’s eyes, examining Sarah’s eyes, her face, for any trace of falsehood, of fear. Whatever she saw either convinced her, or worse, made her understand that any other response was futile, because she nodded, standing aside, out of the doorway. “You remember what I said,” she told Sarah, eyes harsh. _Never go back to him_. If only that had been an option. “And you, you need to feed your woman better,” she told Peña, eyes narrowed with reproach, “She’s too thin to bear healthy children.”

In his car, Sarah was out of words to say, save one, “How?”

“There’s a GPS tracker sewn into the waistband,” he said, nodding toward her sweatpants as he pulled away from the curb, “We suspected they’d try to get you back. Have to say, though, no one expected it to go like that.” 

He drove capably, silently, through the streets of Cartagena, threading through neighborhoods expertly, like he knew them that well. She expected to be driven back to another safe house, or perhaps even to the US Embassy, to be jailed, but he pulled over, after a while, into the parking lot of a small restaurant. 

She looked over at him, silently questioning, as he unbuckled his seatbelt and killed the engine. “Like you said, we need to talk,” he explained. 

She refused to order anything to eat, though he reminded her that he’d been threatened grave injury if he didn’t feed her adequately. He ordered her a Coke, anyway, along with a beer and a plate of arepas for himself. They sat outside, under an umbrellaed picnic table, huddling in under its questionable shade, a bid to stay out of the hot sun. 

“The man who came in your window was Francisco Velasquez,” he said, not wasting any time in getting down to the brass tacks. “Do you know him?”

She stared back at him, running her thumb along the ridges of the coke bottle cap, silent. She did know Francisco - Kiko, they called him. He was one of Alejandro’s men, one of the longest in his employ, if she remembered correctly. A close friend and accomplice. Someone who knew _everything_. “Is he dead?” she asked, instead of answering. 

“No,” Peña replied. “He’s injured, but he’ll live.”

She didn’t have much feeling about that, either way. Not unless it had some bearing on her being subpoenaed to testify.

“He rolled on Alejandro,” he said, watching her eyes, even as she avoided his, staring down at her fingers. “Didn’t take much,” he added. “Based on some of the information he gave us, we searched the house again.”

She knew it was pure folly, to react in any measurable way to what he was saying, but at this, her eyebrows knitted together in the center, a bewildered pucker. The house? What would merit returning to the house? Maybe she didn’t know much, – really, almost certainly didn’t, as Alejandro had insulated her from what he could – but she still wouldn’t have thought that he’d actually be foolish enough to leave any kind of _evidence_ there, where they _lived_ …

“I think I told you, we already had him on the drug trafficking – that was already a life sentence, in all likelihood,” he began to explain, “But we needed you to testify to the human trafficking. Now, it’s looking like we won’t.” 

Her eyes snapped up to his – they were dark and rapt and had nothing more to say, provided no further answers, but were taking everything in, every stunned change in her expression. Try as she might, she would never be a cement wall. Alejandro had once told her that her forehead was like a fishbowl – he could see every thought swimming through it. “Why,” she demanded, her jaw painfully, involuntarily clenched.

“You weren’t the only one,” he said. 

She had the sudden, insane urge, again, to hit him, to reach out and strike him, an impulse that lashed through her like a whip of electricity. She stood abruptly, backed away from the table, to avoid doing so. She was suddenly acutely aware of how hot it was outside, of how she was sweating in the pure black digs they’d dressed her in, gathering in her armpits, sliding down the dip in her spine. 

“Sit down, Sarah,” he instructed, firm. She was shaking her head – she would not, could not, hear anything more, but he spoke again, before she could back away any further, “There were records of at least ten women from Chihuahua, sold to various brothels, most likely.” 

“Stop,” she said, her voice deadly low, a harshly bitten out sound. The heat and humidity were suffocating, like wet muslin draped over her mouth and nose.

But he pressed on, would not stop until she heard all of it, no matter what it did to her, “Some were before you, some after. He didn’t bring any of the others in himself, but everything was at his direction. Probably you were destined for the same, but there must’ve been something special about you, something that made him decide to keep you.” 

_Special?_ She snatched the bottle of Coke from the table and flung it – it shattered against the fence that enclosed the outdoor eating area, loud, explosive, the way she felt inside, the exact same sounds her insides were making. “You’re a monster,” she accused, spitting it like tacks.

“No, _he’s_ a monster. A monster _you_ refused to do anything to put away,” he disagreed. His eyes were a rich, earthen brown, but they were cold as ice. He didn’t understand a single fucking thing about her, any more than she did him. 

“You want me to tell you what happened to me? You want to know fucking everything?” she finally demanded, and at his nod, she turned, started to head back to the car, “Then take me somewhere with air conditioning, and I’ll fucking tell you.”


	11. XI

“What is this place?” she asked, sitting down on a dark brown leather couch as he motioned toward it, heading into the adjoining kitchen to pour them drinks, she thought. It was not at all what she’d imagined – she’d had visions of another interrogation room, of his office in the embassy, of another safe house. 

“My apartment,” he said, taking down two glasses from a cupboard above the sink, opening the freezer for an ice tray. “You said you wanted A/C. Let me know if it feels alright, or if I should turn it down.”

She looked around, taking it in. It was distinctly…seventies. Midcentury modern, if you were being generous. Lots of rich, earthy tones, lots of wood. Quite clean, though, for a man’s apartment, especially one he didn’t appear to share with a woman. There was even art on the walls. She had to imagine the government had procured him this place, decorated it for him. But it was still nice, anyway.

He sat down in the matching leather armchair, just diagonal from her. Set her glass of whiskey down in front of her, on the coffee table. No coaster. He’d removed his shoes just inside the door, and she’d followed suit, but there was something strange about it, watching him walk around the place in socks, so casual. Made her realize she didn’t really see him as his own person, more so as a symbol of everything she fucking hated about the American government. A straw man to burn. 

“I know I can’t technically stop you, but don’t fucking record this,” she requested, tossing back half the pour in one gulp, “It’s off the record.” 

“Not recording,” he said, then added, “I promise.” 

She could choose to believe him or not, but there wasn’t much more she could do about it either way. She sighed heavily, a world weary sound, a sound only half as tired as she felt. When she would most have liked for the world to have slowed on its axis, for time to stop, it only kept turning, an inevitable, unceasing revolution. “I don’t know where to start,” she admitted, finally, when the silence stretched out too long between them, the only sound the hum of the A/C.

“How did your father die?” he asked her, plagued by no such indecision.

“Lung cancer,” she replied, terse. She could feel something rising in her chest, consumptive, ugly.

“That must’ve been hard to watch,” he said. 

She didn’t respond. She wouldn’t go there, where he was trying to take her, not even in her own mind. To do so would be akin to taking her finger from the dike. She was realizing, fairly quickly, that she’d promised something impossible, in offering to tell him everything. 

“And your mother?” He asked.

She set down the glass before it went the way of the Coke bottle, or the last glass he’d handed her, shattered against the wall, in shards on the kitchen floor. “If you researched me like you said you did, you already know the answer to these fucking questions, so why the fuck are you asking?” she demanded, lashing out, venomous, a prodded snake. 

“She killed herself,” he said, and it was not a question. 

“Yes, she did,” she confirmed, jaw tight. “Her life wasn’t worth living without him, not even for me,” she explained, thinking, again, of how determined her mother had been to heal him, even when the oncologist had explained, somber-eyed, that the cancer had metastasized to his bones. Thinking of the reiki, the holistic remedies, the sage smudgings that nearly got her ejected from his hospital room. “Kind of cruel to make me say it, don’t you think?” she demanded. 

“You don’t have any other family?” He asked. 

“Do _you_ have a family?” she demanded, needing to turn the onus of the conversation back onto him before it got out of hand, only managing to do so transparently, gracelessly. “Have you ever been married?” 

“No, I haven’t,” he replied, letting her change the subject. It was an interrogation tactic – try not to push the suspect so far that they break, at least not at first. Just keep them talking, whatever it is they’re saying. She may have known this, but she kept talking anyway, playing into his hand. Silence would only have been another kind of unbearable, now that she’d already revealed so much, sat upon his living room couch like an uncovered wound, oozing. 

“Why not? Married to your job?” she asked. 

“Something like that,” he replied, dry. “You were born in California, weren’t you? How did you end up in Arizona?”

For what reason had she agreed to have this conversation? To prove something to him? To prove that she wasn’t a selfish, heartless person for refusing to testify against Alejandro? To prove that she couldn’t be to blame, because she was a victim, too? It wasn’t going to work. Peña felt the way he felt about her, and she wasn’t going to change his mind. Especially when she couldn’t even think of it, couldn’t even call up from the mire of her memory the things he was asking about. 

Because she could not and would not think about calling her high school boyfriend on the phone, sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak, would not think about how he’d said with a sigh, ‘Sorry, my mom says I have to get off the phone. It’s a school night…’ She would not think at all about packing a bag and getting into her car, chucking her phone out the window on the 101, the disappearing crunch as it impacted the asphalt, driving all the way into the desert like bats were chasing her out of hell. 

She took another sip from her drink. Swirled the glass, watching the melting ice bob around. “I was going to go to New York. After they died, there was no one…” She stopped speaking, abrupt, as her throat went tight, anaphylactic. Took a sharp breath, tried again. “I just wanted to get away from it all, so I was driving to New York. But I ran out of money – I hadn’t planned well, for leaving. I stopped in Arizona to sleep, to decide what to do next. My motel was right next to a bar, and I went in and asked for a job. I figured I’d work for a few weeks, save up tips, some kind of Coyote Ugly shit, and get the fuck out of there. They hired me under the table – didn’t even ask my age. The guy who owned the place was very anti-government, anti-regulation.” 

“Is that where you met Alejandro?” he asked. 

She shot him a terse look, disrupted. He was trying to jump ahead, skip pages. But it was _her_ story to tell. “Yes. He came in almost every night, just well dressed enough to stand out. And he was really nice to me, and he always tipped well. I mean clearly, the Freudian cast to it all isn’t lost on me, now, but then, to be honest, I was just _tired_ , and I wanted someone to take care of me again.”

Peña nodded, more to encourage her to keep talking, she thought, than to indicate that he understood. She was almost sure he didn’t understand what it felt like, to be a ghost amongst the living, clinging to anything that would anchor you to the earth. 

“So we started sleeping together, and he was giving me money, which I was squirreling away for New York,” she continued, “I didn’t know who he was, or what he really did. I especially didn’t know that he was in Arizona at the time because he was working with the CIA, across the border in Mexico. But you probably didn’t know that either, did you?” she asked, a little smug. She didn’t have to ask – she could read it all in his expression. He absolutely did not. “Yeah, well, no one did. See, story goes, the Sonoran cartel slaughtered Alejandro’s whole family. That you probably did know, it’s no secret.”

Peña nodded. “His wife and daughter.” _His girls_ , Alejandro had always called them. But she was his girl, too. 

“Right, well, the CIA is pretty tired of the Sonoran cartel, right? And Alejandro, he’s not so fond of them either. Kind of a match made in heaven, I guess. He knew enough about the trade, and about the way these drug lords move, to help the CIA track down one motherfucker in particular – the one who ordered the hit on his family. And they sent him over there to cap the son of a bitch. And _his_ wife and kids.” 

“That’s impossible,” Peña said. 

She knew what he was thinking. The CIA was not a death squad, and it didn’t enlist cartel sicarios to take out its enemies. But that was only _officially_ true. She just shrugged. “All I know is, Alejandro went away for a few days, and when he came back, something had changed. Something in the way that he looked at me. And I heard him on the phone one morning, talking to someone, maybe a CIA agent, discussing the entire operation, in detail. And that’s when I knew. I mean, in hindsight, I say that – in reality, there was no way I could possibly know all that came next. But I do remember thinking that he couldn’t just let me go, out into the world, after hearing all of that. And he didn’t.” 

“So he brought you back to Colombia because you knew too much?” Peña asked, brows drawn together in the center, processing it all.

“That was the excuse,” she said, “He’d engineered it that way. You don’t think he could’ve had that telephone conversation somewhere else, some other time?” she scoffed. “He wanted a reason, you know? A way to make it my fault. That’s what he always said to me – maybe if you hadn’t been so nosy…My life was its own fucking cautionary tale.” 

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, capturing her gaze and holding it, trying to impress upon her his earnestness. She wasn’t buying it.

She just rolled her eyes, dismissive. “Whatever. It was and it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter now. Anyway, now you know what I know,” she said simply, closing out the sordid tale. She wondered whether she was any more real to him, now. Whether he could feel the weight of her life in his hands. Wondered if she’d accomplished a single thing there, besides damning herself further. “It’s up to you now, you know, whether I live or die. If you tell anyone what I told you, or make me testify to any of it, I die. Not just maybe. If you don’t, to be honest, I might still die. But I also might have a chance to have my own life again.” There was something sort of liberating about it, ceding control in this way. There was so much less pressure in thinking about the future when you couldn’t be sure if you’d live to see another day. And maybe it was something she’d been after for a long time. Part of her, in truth, was certain he would damn her – that the part of him that was a DEA agent simply could not let her go. 

He stared at her for a long time, his glass resting on the arm of his chair, the ice melting. Then he sat the glass aside, pushed to his feet and left the room. She stared after him as he disappeared down the hall, watched as he returned with a small, familiar rectangle. A passport, which he handed to her before sitting down again, wordless. 

“Why are you giving me this?” she asked, bewildered. It was not just a passport. It was _her_ passport, which he was presumably giving back to her. To keep. To do with whatever she wished. She stared down at her picture in it, her sixteen-year-old face staring back at her, unsmiling, eyes empty, incapable of knowing a single thing that was to follow. 

“You’ll need it if you want to go back to the US,” he replied simply, giving her those neutral fucking eyes. 

“Want to,” she repeated. 

He nodded. “Like I said, we don’t need you to testify, and you’ve made it extremely clear that you aren’t going to do so voluntarily,” as she continued to stare at him, uncomprehending, he explained further, “So you’re free to go.” 

So that was it. He’d put her through this fresh fucking hell for _what_? Just to tell her that oh, nevermind, we’ve actually decided _against_ forcing you to tighten this noose around your own neck? Well, that was just peachy. 

It was also clear that in declining to help them, she’d declined their help. They had no intention of helping her get back to the US, back “home,” which she really wasn’t even sure was the right word for it. There was no witness protection program, no more safe house. She’d simply been set free, like a too small caught fish. 

She knew she was supposed to feel a fresh wash of relief, sweeping over her like a tide. Instead she felt empty, cavernous, like now there was really _nothing left_ to her, like the gaping hole through the center of her had grown wider and wider, until it swallowed her whole, until there was nothing remaining but the wind whistling its way through. 

She sat there for quite a while longer, still processing, reeling. Then she said, “Can I borrow some money for a cab?”


	12. XII

She stared up at the ceiling, watching the slow rotation of the ceiling fan blades. Flat on her back, she lay silent as the tomb, enrobed in the fullness of the dark. Her head was pounding and her mouth tasted like acid. The room smelled close, animal. Her hair, crawling across the pillows like vines, was matted into fat, unbecoming hanks at the scalp. She could feel her bladder, pressed full and tight against the drum of her belly, an ache she would not answer. 

Time had ceased to exist in that room. She drifted in and out of sleep, the sun streamed in the windows, crawled its way across her in bed and back out again, and she paid no mind to any of it. Time had slowed to a standstill, ceased to exist. 

“Mami made you some caldo.” 

She hadn’t even heard the hushed sound of the door easing open, nor Jo’s footsteps as she made her way timidly into the room, balancing a tray with a steaming bowl of soup. She set it down on the nightstand, trading it for the now stone cold plate of arroz con pollo she’d last left there for Sarah, like she was a stray cat the young girl was trying to trap. Sarah felt a pang of regret, of shame, for not cleaning the plate, for being incapable of summoning the energy to so much as lift her head and _look at it_. But all food now turned to ash in her mouth.

“Paola and I are going to watch Frozen. You should come out and watch with us,” with this, and without hesitating to wait for an answer, Nick’s thirteen-year-old sister turned and left the room, shutting the door softly at her back. Of everyone, she seemed to understand the best, seemed to be the least critical of, Sarah’s determined, unyielding silence, the day after day spent in bed, scarcely expending the energy to breathe. Sarah thought Jo probably _wanted_ to talk to her, wanted to linger longer in the room, seeking companionship, but in the way of a youngest sibling, also knew how to read when her presence was not desired. 

The worst were the days when Nick’s mother, Luz, would come into the room, would roust Sarah out of the bed to change the sheets, would yank aside the drapes, would encourage her, with zero judgment, but also zero understanding, to get up, to come to the market with her, to get outside, feel the sun on her face. Those days, Sarah could hardly breathe for the remorse, for the gut-wrenching shame, the injustice of it, to force Luz to care for her, a woman she hardly knew, when she was the reason her son was dead. If it were possible to die for self-loathing, Sarah felt she’d have died a thousand times over. 

But Nick’s family were _good people_. When she’d taken that taxi to their door, they’d welcomed her in like a daughter, fed her from their table, clothed her, and given her Nick’s old bedroom to sleep in. They’d set aside their own mourning for their son and brother to tend to hers – especially his mother, whose overwhelming positivity in the face of such an unending mire made Sarah recoil, made her feel sick and selfish, evil. One more thing to add to the list of sins she could not forgive herself. If she had been a better person, she would have taken Peña’s money and gone to a women’s shelter, allowed an actual charity to assist her. 

But she knew Nick’s family was waiting. They’d been expecting the star-crossed pair, freed from Alejandro at last, had promised to stow them away, to hide them from the cartel, until their passage to the United States could be arranged. So, in the end, she’d followed through, though Nick could not, because ultimately, the last thing in the world she really wanted was to be alone. The more she thought about it, she realized perhaps Peña had identified in her something she could not see herself. Perhaps she _was_ rotten, down to her very core.

-

“Please, Sarah, just do me this one favor. Mami won’t let me go unless you do.”

Sarah sat cross-legged at the foot of her bed – Paola stood over her, large, dark eyes, not terribly unlike Nick’s, wide and beseeching. It was the first week Sarah had even been _out of bed_ , and yet Paola, Nick’s eighteen-year-old sister, was begging her to roust herself totally, accompany her on a night out with friends. Sarah wondered if it would have any measurable effect, her mentioning that Luz had probably, most likely, conditioned her daughter’s attendance on their guest’s own willingness to tag along because she knew Sarah would almost certainly refuse to. 

And yet, there was some part of her that didn’t want to disappoint Paola, didn’t want to deny her. It likely had something to do with the fact that Paola, out of the entire family, made the least secret out of her discomfort in sharing space with Sarah. She often caught Paola eyeing her from across a room, lids narrowed with suspicion, like she was asking herself who the hell Sarah thought she was, and how the hell she dared. Sarah was no substitute for the brother she’d lost, not by a long shot. 

It was the imposter in Sarah, she thought, that made it impossible to accept that anyone could see through the artifice, to the deceptive root in her. Paola knew she was a fucking fraud, and as long as she dangled this knowledge over Sarah’s head, pendulous, taunting, Sarah was hers. 

So she found herself, dressed like a ball-jointed doll by Paola and a group of her friends, in an obscenely pink mini dress constructed for someone with curves Sarah no longer had, her eyes painted dark like a bandit’s, hair combed out and flat ironed straight, crammed into the back of one of the girls’ cars, passing back and forth a flask of whiskey as they made their way to the bar. 

“Loosen up,” Paola nudged her, sharp elbow digging into intercostal space. “Here,” she tucked the flask into Sarah’s palm, coaxing. 

“She looks like she’s on her way to a funeral,” Carmen, one of Paola’s friends said _of_ Sarah, rather than _to_ her, eyeing her in the rearview mirror. 

“It’s been a while since I’ve been out like this,” Sarah shrugged, not necessarily feeling like she needed to defend herself, but doing it anyway, taking a gulp of cinnamon whiskey that burned all the way down. In reality, she had never, in her entire life, been out like this, to a bar with a group of friends. She’d _worked in_ one, but that wasn’t quite the same. 

“Trust me, it’s going to be fun,” Paola insisted, eyes soft with a little more understanding, now, reaching out to take back the flask. 

Sarah turned away, staring out the window, eyes tracking cars and streetlights streaking past.


	13. XIII

The night was oppressive with heat – a sheen over her skin like hot silk as the group of girls made their way into the bar, which was a squat, boxy establishment hunched precisely in the center of the village, adorned with neon light and tinted windows; a plump, faded mermaid emblazoned on its front door. Inside, the air was thick and muggy with beer and sweat and desperation. The light was low and orange, the bar top a polished, unappealing steel, the floors tiled in dull laminate. It was not the kind of place she had expected young people to hang out – but then again, perhaps it was the _only_ place for young people to hang out. 

She crushed peanut shells beneath the chunky soles of her heels as the group gravitated, a cloudlike unit, over to the corner of the bar, where a table full of young men sat, drinking the day off, it looked like, talking and laughing loud. Paola’s boyfriend was among them – Joseph; he looked like a nice kid, and his entire face lit up when he saw her, which Sarah thought was sweet. They ordered another round of cervezas, which was what everyone else in the bar seemed to be drinking, save for the much older men clear across the room quietly nursing tumblers of amber colored liquid.

Paola was right, everyone was having fun. An uncomplicated kind of fun, light as air. And Sarah wanted to join, she really did. Wanted to put everything aside and laugh and joke – act her own fucking age for just one night. But she was too tense, edgy, like she was awaiting some great blow. Maybe she was. 

Knowing she was not likely to be missed, she picked up her beer and slid from her stool, restless, wanting to scope out the rest of the bar. Wanting to look, if she was honest, for every exit. Wanting to look for _him_ in the face of every man in the room, scanning for the montane, easy bulk of him, those wolf’s eyes. She would drive herself fucking insane with it, seeing his ghost at every turn. Honestly, she needn’t have looked. It had been in the news, his extradition to the United States. He was there, and she was here. _But was she?_

Just as she was about to return to the group, she saw him. Seated at the bar like another kind of nightmare, the right angle of his nose unmistakable, especially in profile. He must have already seen her, she knew. He was observant that way, not much escaping him. She joined him at the bar, climbing up onto the stool beside him. 

The bartender meandered over as she sat, before Peña could turn to her, before either one of them could speak. 

“I’ll have a whiskey, please,” she requested. As he set it down before her, and she took a tentative sip, Peña gave her a slow, disapproving once over, mouth folded almost square beneath his mustache.

“You don’t look well,” he said simply. It was peculiar, his speaking English to her. She hadn’t spoken English in weeks – it sounded clunky to her now, even in his honeyed voice.

“Gee, thanks,” she scoffed, taking a larger gulp of her drink. 

“Are you…you’re not…” he fumbled for the words, looking her over once again, gaze lingering long enough on the dress that she caught on to what he intended.

“No, I’m not turning tricks,” she scowled at him. He was such a fucking… _something_. Bastard didn’t even seem to do it justice. To be fair, she supposed it wasn’t out of the question, that she would’ve turned to sex work after being turned loose by the DEA. If she was being _honest_ with herself, how far was it, in reality, from what she’d actually done for the past five years?

“That’s good,” he nodded, staring back down into his own glass. “Guess you probably heard about Herrera.” 

She nodded, said, without an ounce of sincerity, “Congratulations. Heard you got your concurrent life sentences.” 

“Good news for us both,” he said, “Seems like the cartel has pretty much left you alone, huh?”

“Or they just haven’t found me yet,” she shrugged, knowing that it was precisely _that_. Caught up in preparing Alejandro’s defense, tracking her down had been put on an indefinite hold. But one day, when she least expected it, they would catch the scent of her blood on the wind, hunt her down, back her into a corner. The cartel didn’t _forget_. 

“Do you need some cash for food?” he asked her, side-eyeing her again, her body, the strange, shadowy hollow of her clavicles, the bizarre sharpness of her shoulders. “You look…hungry.”

She rolled her eyes, necking the remainder of her drink. “You’re not responsible for me,” she said. “You _were_ , arguably, responsible for me, once, and you judged me. Scorned me. I don’t want your fucking money.” 

“I never _scorned_ you,” he disagreed, mouth twisted around the word like it tasted bitter. His eyebrows were knitted together, creases between them and in his forehead like lines of a river. “Look I’m…it’s like a cop thing, okay? We don’t trust easy. There was something off about you. Made me nervous.” He was careful not to clarify, whether _it_ made him nervous, that _off_ thing about her, or if _she_ made him nervous, herself. Both, probably. The thought was fairly fascinating; that she might have that kind of effect on another person. There was a power in it.

“I mean, I buy that it’s a cop thing to be an utter fucking prick – doesn’t mean it’s okay,” she shrugged, motioning to the bartender for a refill, deciding to sit there a while longer. 

He scoffed out an almost laugh, impressed-like, shaking his head. “You know, my partner and I had dinner with his wife after we got Herrera, to celebrate. And he told her about you. That woman chewed us out for about fifteen minutes for how we handled things. Said all you’d been through, you were probably traumatized, and we’d only made that worse, made you close up tighter by leaning on you so hard.” He was musing, talking about it in a detached sort of way, like he wasn’t talking about her or them or the things he’d done. “But that’s what they teach us in training, you know? To be conviction oriented. There’s no classes on victim sensitivity.” 

This was distinctly not an apology. She could sense that an apology was not something she would get from him, not something he was willing to give. And maybe that was just as well. It all felt like ancient fucking history at that point, anyway. Her hatred toward him was so distant she could scarcely source it now. Had likely been misdirected from the start. A projection. 

“You know what, I am hungry,” she decided, tossing back the entire shot the bartender had just poured her, harsh like blended tacks. “I saw an empanada stand down the street,” she remembered, sliding down from her stool, unmooring from the bar, a ship launched at sea, looking back over her shoulder to inquire, “You coming?”


	14. XIV

“So where are you staying now?” Peña asked, sitting across from her, not so much eating with her as watching her devour an empanada in record time, eating through the oily scald of the pastry, the savory, spicy spill of filling. She was suddenly ravenous, hungry like she hadn’t been in weeks. Perhaps the alcohol was to blame.

“With Nick’s family,” she said, eyes rolling up to watch his. They were the same as ever, dark and inscrutable. “They, for whatever reason, still took me in, even though he…” she put down the empanada. The pastry felt thick in her throat now, gummy. 

“They’re probably glad to have some reminder of him,” he said, watching her too closely, with those shrewd DEA agent's eyes, reading her, feeling for chinks in her armor. “They probably knew how much he loved you.”

“You’re so fucking irritating,” she complained, pushing her plate decidedly away. 

“You’re very bad at pretending,” he replied simply, expression unchanged, unmoved by the force of her emotion. “Did you ever love him?”

“He was my way out,” she said, refusing to respond directly, refusing to give him the satisfaction of hearing her admit it. No, the word love did not capture what she felt about Nick. But neither did she feel nothing about him, even now. And this was not anything she could explain to Peña; not when she could barely conceptualize it herself. “It was impossible to love anything in that fucking place. But I didn’t hate him. I didn’t want him dead because of me.” 

“You think Herrera had Nick killed because he found out about the two of you?” he asked, brows furrowed, like it wasn’t something he’d considered, the very thing that had kept her awake every night in the past handful of weeks, staring up into the dark of the ceiling until the lacy texture of the stucco warped, crawled like something live. 

Yes. “I think it’s possible.” 

“Don’t you think you’d be dead too? He didn’t strike me as the type to let that kind of thing slide,” he theorized, approaching the topic like a detective, like it was just another investigation. Like it wasn’t her life and the looming certainty of her death that they were weighing. 

She didn’t answer. Wouldn’t engage any further. She couldn’t say what she was thinking, which was that she _was_ dead. She just hadn’t had the sense to stop breathing yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is quite short (probably should've tacked it onto the last one). But the next few are quite long. Hope y'all are enjoying!


	15. XV

He walked her back to the bar once her food went cold, once it became manifest that she would not be finishing the plate he’d bought her. Inside, they sat down together at the bar, wordlessly, likely taking in at the same instant that her group had left the bar, abandoned her. She supposed she had abandoned them first. Even so, it seemed strange that Paola would do such a thing, knowing that she was unfamiliar with the area. Then again, if she had seen Sarah leaving the bar at the side of a strange man, perhaps it _wasn't_ any wonder. 

“Whiskey?” Peña turned to her for confirmation as the bartender made his rounds. 

She nodded, pulling in the glass as soon as it was poured for her, taking a sip. 

“Why didn’t you go back to the US?” he asked her after a while, sat together drinking in an almost companionable silence. “Don’t you miss it? Don’t you have people that miss you?”

“How long have you been in Colombia?” she asked him, instead of answering. She felt she’d made the answer to his questions perfectly clear, maybe more than once. She was no one, had no one. Alejandro had made her Luci, had given her affiliation, a home. But he was gone, Luci did not exist without him, and she’d quickly learned that neither did she. 

“Five years,” he said. Funny. They’d arrived in the country at around the same time. In such different contexts. For instance, she had to imagine he had not been drugged practically into oblivion, guided down the jet bridge like an invalid, excused by flight attendants as having had one too many at the airport bar. 

“You don’t miss the states?” One of the myriad reasons she couldn’t, wouldn’t answer him when he’d asked her the same was because she wasn’t _sure_ whether she did. Couldn’t identify, in isolation, any longing for that land of “freedom.” It wasn’t what her heart ached for. 

He shrugged, said, “This is where the job is.” 

“You didn’t leave anyone behind?” she tried to imagine his life, as it had been before he had been assigned to this case, _her_ case. His life in Texas, probably busting small-time cartel operatives. Had he been there when she’d been in Arizona, near close enough to reach out and touch?

“I’m still close with my family. I talk to them all the time. They miss me, sure. But they understand why I’m here.” she thought about his family, wondered if he had a lot of it, the kind of family that filled a table on Thanksgiving, filled a room with conversation and warmth and too much wine, football and screaming babies and petty dramas. Even before everything that had happened to her, she had never had _that_.

“How come you’re single? Can’t find anyone to put up with you?” she asked. She was turned toward him on her stool now, scrutinizing him. She had always found him beautiful. No part of her hating him had ever changed that. He _was_ beautiful. 

He chuckled good-naturedly, unoffended. Unoffendable. “Something like that. Guess I don’t think it would really be fair, signing someone else up for this.” The potential for complete devastation loomed large, she guessed, when it came to marrying a DEA agent. Everything he was up against came to the fight armed. But she didn’t think that was it. 

“Or you just like sleeping around without any real responsibility,” she offered alternatively. 

He just shook his head, smiling into his glass. 

“Were you just here drinking the day off, or were you looking for a little late night _amor_?” she asked him, arching an eyebrow, fascinated by the realization. Of _course_ he’d come here to get laid. 

“You’re nosy,” he said, disapproving. This was distinctly not an answer in the negative. 

“Sorry I cock-blocked you,” she shrugged, emptying her third glass of whiskey, no longer feeling the burn of it in her gut, though a different warmth spread all through her blood, throwing shimmers through her. “You should’ve given me some kind of signal. Wait, is _that_ why you were asking me if I was a prostitute?” she taunted. 

He scowled, tried to look fearsome, but as she belly-laughed, absolutely tickled by her own joke, a smile broke through, spreading across his cheeks, creasing his eyes with mirth. “You have a nice laugh,” he commented, “I don’t remember ever hearing it before.” 

“Oh, I was laughing plenty at you and Detective Steve-o behind your backs,” she smirked. 

He snorted, rolling his eyes, said, “Yeah, I bet.” 

“You better keep an eye on that one,” she told him, of Detective Murphy, “It’s always those white kids – the blonde, blue eyed, attractive ones; the Hitler youth – that have all the rage issues.” She’d noticed it, in her dealings with the two of them – Murphy carried his rage close, quiet, while Peña was hot blooded, shimmering at the surface like oil, a low-level, constant seethe. In her experience, the quiet ones were ten times worse, when the lid finally blew. 

He didn’t remark on this observation, just stared back at her, but there was something in the swirling dark of his eyes that said perhaps she’d struck an accurate note. 

“You play pool?” she asked him, noticing, over the rise of his shoulder, that most of the billiards tables had cleared out. 

“It’s getting late,” he said, hesitant. 

“It’s okay to be afraid of losing,” she assured him, requesting a beer from the bartender to take with her into the small billiards room, which was half cordoned off from the rest of the bar by particle board partition, “But come on, just one game.” There was something sort of sad about it, really, her cajoling him into staying out with her - but she was just now, warmed by the liquor, starting to feel _real_ , like a typical twenty-something year-old out at a bar, and she was loath to break the spell of the evening. 

Rolling his eyes, he flagged for his own beer, then followed after her. 

“You’re not even holding the cue right,” he complained, having spent about five whole minutes racking the balls, making sure they were painstakingly in place. He had a streak of the perfectionist in him, she noticed. 

“What difference does it make?” she shrugged, “What if I’ve actually discovered a much more effective technique, and it’s everyone else that’s wrong?”

“Sounds unlikely,” he said, sidling up behind her to pull her arms up, into place, arranging her hands ‘correctly’ on the cue. He touched her with complete comfort, with confidence, hands warm, sure. It was kind of pathetic, she thought, for this to be the first semblance of human touch she’d felt in over a month. Even more pathetic was the way she leaned into it, savoring it, soothed by it, like a balm. 

She faffed around a little bit, a fair amount of pageantry, knocking balls clear off the table, missing unmissable shots, watching his confidence build, one corner of his mouth tugging up into a bemused smirk. 

“I thought you were pretty sure you were going to win,” he reminded her, standing back from the table, having himself missed only one shot out of the three he’d taken, leaning on his cue, unimpressed.

“Oh, right,” she said, as though she’d only just remembered it, her declaration of confidence. She stepped forward, squaring her hips, lining up her next shot without assistance, sinking it. 

He caught on immediately, expression turning on a dime. “You’re a little _hustler_ ,” he accused, the censure punctuated by the sound of her sinking another shot. 

“I think it was your cue technique – it really seems to help,” she disagreed, rounding the table, nudging her hip against his, playfully, before sidling up to the table to pocket the second to last shot. 

“Give me that,” he complained, reaching in, trying to seize the cue from her hand, “You’re being disqualified for unsportsmanlike behavior.” 

“Get the fuck out of here,” she laughed, twisting, as he curled his arm in around her, trying to yank the cue out of her unrelenting grip, “You’re a sore loser.” She pulled the cue in toward her chest, tighter, curling her shoulders in to ward off his advances, as he, laughing, continued to try to wrest the cue away from her, his chest flush against her back, leaning, full body, into her, over her.

There was a striking moment of lucidity, of awareness, between them then, like someone had flipped a switch, where they both paused, interrupted mid-laugh, and stared into one another’s eyes, a perfect, almost eerie understanding passing in multitudes between them. She searched his eyes, his face, reading every line, from the heavy knit of his brow, over the perfect angle of that Picasso nose. 

Standing out from all of it, something came to her with sudden clarity – she wanted to put her mouth to his, wanted to feel his face between her hands, had wanted this without recognizing the impulse, ever since she’d first seen him sitting there at the bar. Wanted it more than anything she’d wanted in a very long time. 

Tentative, she tilted her chin, fit her mouth to his, pressing her lips to his in an almost chaste kiss. 

He jerked back, surprised, having succeeded in capturing the cue from her hand, as she’d let it go to steady herself with a palm to his chest, feeling the steady thud of his heart there as he looked at her, brow furrowed, like he didn’t recognize her.

Turning fully toward him now, she arched toward him, angling her body into his, and she tried again to kiss him, tracing her fingertips along his jaw, feeling the bristle of stubble, a curious texture, more grating than the feeling of his mustache around her mouth. 

Catching her entirely off guard, he leaned into her in return, kissing her back, much more gently, testing, lips that were slack gone into a delicate, painstaking motion, like he was trying not to startle her, or trying not to startle himself. But this built, a slow drag, as he pressed forward incrementally more, and then seemed to explode out of him all at once. He seized her around the waist, dragging her in against his chest with a sound that was more animal than man, a low, wounded groan, her ribcage clashing against muscle with little more give than bone. His strength was crushing – squeezed all the air out of her, against his lips.

Fuck, she was _on fire_ in his arms, out of control with it, on the tips of her toes to press her body against his harder, thinking, wishing, she could kiss her way through him, into his body and out the other side. She didn’t feel solid, felt porous and full of gaps, like osmosis wouldn’t be out of the question. He held her steady, his hands on her face.

He pulled away and she could’ve _sobbed_ , holding her at bay, hands braced against her shoulders. “We should stop,” he said, so husky and low it was nearly indecipherable, his voice, even, making things tighten, low, in her gut. 

“Take me home with you,” she insisted, sure, licking the taste of him from her lips. 

“Fuck,” he groaned, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “I knew you were fucking trouble.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who has left a comment!


	16. XVI

She remembered the way to his apartment door – leaned outside it, waiting for him to catch up, to find his keys in his jacket pocket. She spilled in the door as he unlocked it, already kicking her heels aside. He was groping for a light switch as she pushed the door shut behind them, drawing the chain. He still hadn’t found the light – they were in utter darkness, still, but as her eyes adjusted to the scant fingers of moonlight creeping between the gaps in the blinds, she could make out the shape of him, the barest outlines of his features. She found his mouth with her fingers, first, then pressed her lips there. The burn of his stubble, the brush of that delectable mustache, around her mouth, thrilled her.

He kissed her back, fingers curling about her waist, sliding into the hair at the nape of her neck to cradle her skull, to tilt her head, to deepen the kiss, all at once tentative and determined. His lips were soft, in sharp contrast with the scratch of his stubble beneath her fingers, against her chin. She ran her tongue along his lower lip, sucking it slightly into her mouth. 

“You okay?” he asked her, voice husky soft, affected, but sincere. He cared if she was okay, _wanted_ her to be okay. Wanted _this_ to be okay. 

She was more than okay. She nodded, but thought he might not be able to see it, in the pall of the dark, said, “I want you so fucking bad.” Her voice sounded twice as wrecked as his, almost embarrassing. 

When she pressed herself back into his arms, he didn’t pull away. She arched up onto her toes, kissing his neck, taking an earlobe between her teeth. More, she had to have so much more of him if she was ever, ever going to be whole again. His body felt solid, rooted and oak-like as she swayed, slip-like, inconsequential, a wisp of smoke. He stumbled backwards, though, as she pushed him, driving him toward an armchair, which she could just make out in the dark of the room. When the back of his knees hit the chair’s cushion, he sat. 

She climbed into his lap, straddling him, pressing herself in against him, tight, kissing his neck, forcing his leather jacket back over his shoulders, then starting to pluck at the buttons of his shirt. She could feel him in between her thighs, especially as she dropped down to sit in his lap properly, their hips square, still working at his buttons. She dragged his shirt back over his shoulders – his chest hair was sparse, unremarkable, his skin a delicious, honey-golden hue. He freed his hands to brace them on her hips, low, gripping the sides of her ass, really.

She kissed him like she could feed at his mouth, like he had all the oxygen, everything that she would ever need to sustain her. He kissed her back, enthusiastically, lips and tongue and the stray clash of teeth. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough by far, wouldn’t ever be fucking enough. She reached down to seize his right hand, tugging aside the soaking wet fabric of her underwear and fitting his hand in between her legs in one fluid move. His fingertips met the slickness there and he groaned against her mouth, pulling momentarily away to say, “Jesus Christ, you’re fucking wet.” 

“No shit,” she said, a little impatient, warlike, cursing against his mouth as he drew slippery fingertips up to slide across her clit. The sensation was sharp, wild, almost unimaginable. She was suddenly and painfully tethered to a body that she had merely floated above, outside of, for months. 

She reached down between them for the buckle of his belt, and he caught her hand in his, holding it back. 

“Take it easy,” he chastised, taking her earlobe between his teeth, giving it a not particularly gentle nip. His hands smoothed up her waist, thumbs stroking over the banded curve of her ribcage, then up over her nipples, which had been hard against the fabric of her dress, aching to be touched, for far too long. He slid one strap down her shoulder, kissing his way across it, tugging the neckline down, touching bare skin, palm strong and warm as it cupped a breast. 

Both straps fell free of her shoulders, the too-large dress slipping down around her waist, pooling silkily there. His mouth closed in around her nipple, teeth sinking in just sharply enough for her jaw to drop open, an exhale wheezing its way free. The sensation of his facial hair against her soft skin was scratchy, almost ticklish. He laved away the bite with his tongue, with a delicate suck. His fingertips circled her clit deftly, inspiring a building sensation in her abdomen that threatened to eclipse everything, to overload her brain. 

“Do _not_ ,” she insisted, catching his wrist, holding his fingers still between her legs. She was so _close_ , gearing up for utter ruin, a horrible, constantly winding tightness in the very pit of her stomach. “I want you inside me.” 

“You’re so impatient,” he complained, mouth at her breasts, teeth sinking in, retributive. “Stand up, baby. Take this off.” He reached behind her, pulled the zipper down to make it easier. 

On wobbly legs, she stood, let the dress slip from her hips, pool at her feet. Stepped out of her underwear while she was at it, in the interest of expediency. Stood before him naked, provoked to violence, somewhat, by the tactility of his eyes on her, moving over every square inch of flesh laid bare. She knew she was too fucking skinny – she didn’t even recognize her body at this point, refused to look at it in the mirror, on the rare days she took a shower. Her hipbones jutted out from the concave dish of her belly, crude. On every inhale, one could see the alien shifting of her ribcage beneath her skin. Her knees and elbows were knobby, ugly, tits scrawny. She hadn’t shaved in longer than she wanted to muse over. He looked at her, though, like there was no part of her he would not have happily _devoured_. 

From the armchair, still seated, he shrugged completely out of his jacket, his shirt, let them both drop to the carpet. Motioned her back into his arms, interrupting the reel of self-hatred in her mind with his voice low, soft, coaxing, “Come here, preciosa.” 

_Don’t fucking call me that_ , she thought, but didn’t say. She settled back into his lap, and his fingers were back between her legs immediately, calloused fingertips dragging over her clit in slow, sharp circles, coercing. Both of her hands shot out, this time, to grab his wrist, “Fuck, wait, you gotta stop, I’m—”

He stopped, but her clit continued throbbing, as if pulsing toward the tips of his fingers, seeking the sensation. Pulling back from it, denying it, almost _burned_ , brightly, incredibly; the kind you longed for more of, muscles all flexing toward it, chasing it. Fuck, he’d really almost made her come _that quickly_. But she had never managed to come more than once at a time, and she didn’t want to _waste_ it. She wanted him inside her _so badly_. 

“How about this, baby,” he offered, gamely, reaching up between her legs again to slide a finger into her, deep. A sharp, involuntary sound found its way out of her mouth, her cheek against his cheek.

“Fine,” she said, breathless, “Just don’t make me come yet,” she insisted, determined but panting, working her hips down against the finger he’d crooked inside of her. 

“Sure, baby,” he agreed, sliding another finger inside, deep, through the resistance of the muscles flexing around him and the copious, steady drip of wetness, slicking him to his palm.

She clutched at his forearm to have something to hold onto as he started moving those fingers in and out of her, rocking them steadily up inside of her, her grip wavering, uncertain, like maybe she wanted to stop him, maybe needed to, but couldn’t decide. Her eyes were rolling back, brain sparking at the sensation. Jesus _Christ_ , even this was too much, the orgasm threatening to sweep her under with her every gasping, openmouthed suck for air. 

“You wanna come, don’t you, baby?” he breathed against her ear, while her legs spasmed, shook, thighs squeezing in around his hand involuntarily. 

“No, I want you to fuck me,” she whined, a sound which devolved into a broken gasp as his thumb came up to press hard against her clit, slicking back the hood. 

“I’m gonna fuck you, baby, I promise,” he murmured, “But I want you to come all over my fingers, first.” 

Even if she’d wanted to keep arguing with him, at that point, it would have been moot – her body was already starting to tip over the edge, to succumb to the sharp, screaming sensation, ratcheting tighter and tighter in her gut, and she came the next moment with a wretched, full-body _throb_ , clenching down around his fingers with a totally helpless, gasping cry. She came in his hand and he didn’t stop – still pushing his fingers up into her, drawing it out of her, every throb of the pleasure wringing its way out of her, rending her, tooth and nail. 

He pulled his fingers free, sucked them immediately into his mouth, licking them clean. It was fucking wretched to watch, so sickeningly revealing, his dark eyes on hers, pupils blown. It felt like her brain was short-circuiting, _sparking_ , and she reached down between them again to fumble with the buckle of his belt, his fly, pulling his pants open enough to finally get her hand under his waistband, curling it around him. Jesus H. _Christ_ , he was thick. 

“You want that inside you, baby?” he said, low, dangerously low, leaning in to press his lips to hers, sloppy, the tang of her pussy on his tongue. Her heart jumped in response.

Christ, they were both like completely different people now. Unrecognizable. But somehow this version of her, this version of him, was more real, more honest, than anything that had come before.

“Fuck, yes,” she sighed, drawing up her fist, giving him a squeeze that made him groan against her mouth. 

“Think you can take it, sweetheart?” he asked, brow cocked expectantly, eyes stormy with lust, swallowed up by blown pupils. 

“Yeah,” she breathed out softly, meekly. In truth, it was hard to predict.

“Alright, let me just…” he trailed off, reaching between them to work his boxers and jeans off, down his hips, but not before reaching into his back pocket for his wallet, from which he produced a shiny foil packeted condom, which he rolled on, pumping himself through his fist a few times, a sight more explicit than anything she’d ever seen.

“You ready?” he breathed against her lips, pressing it against her, then thrusting, slow, letting it just slide along her slit, slicking through the wetness. 

“Fuck,” she hissed as the head of his cock bumped against her clit, which was still throbbing, hyper-sensitive, “Just fuck me already,” she insisted, wanting it and wanting to climb off of him in turn, wishing he’d hurry up and decide for her. She knew he’d stop now, if she were to ask, but she didn’t want him to give her the opportunity.

He chuckled, and with the next stroke, he angled up to begin pushing inside of her. 

The head of him alone stretched her to the point of hot, stinging pain. Her jaw fell open. He kissed her deeply, distractingly, sinking down into her, slow and huge. By some combination of gravity and sheer force of will, she kept sinking down into his lap and he kept sinking inside her, stretching her open around him, her knees hugging around the outside of his thighs, her breath sharp and wounded against his lips. 

“Jesus Christ that’s a tight little cunt,” he hissed, breathing hard, once he was inside her, as deep as he was going to get. 

No fucking shit. She couldn’t even speak, she was stretched so unbelievably around him, crammed so totally full. It felt sick and hot and horrible, and it didn’t, of course, end there, because as soon as he reached the end of her, he began to guide her hips, to coax her to draw back, easing her into a slow-sawing tempo, working her open around his cock. She ground her hips down into his lap in short little rotations, just feeling him, driven up inside of her. His hands were in her hair, stroking along her back, gripping around her waist.

She didn’t like it, if she was being honest. Really never had – it felt alien, like an invasion, like a pressure that threatened to split her body at the seams. And he was just too much for her – their bodies clearly incompatible. And all of her skin was so hot, on fire, all of his skin equally searing hot, pressed up against hers. She didn’t like it, but she stared up into his face and she liked him _so much_ in that moment, a twisting, disorienting feeling in her gut that made her go starry eyed, made her kiss him harder.

He reached down between their bodies to stroke her clit, fingertips so deft, so delicate in comparison to the harsh, awful sensation of his body filling up hers. And out of the discomfort, she could feel something else beginning to build, a new sensation, something different, layered, a feeling like someone was yanking a string behind her bellybutton that made all her bones begin to lock, her muscles tightening up in ratchets of pressure that just kept building. She realized she’d been too quick to pass judgment on this sensation; that maybe, in truth, it was the only one she ever wanted to feel again. 

“Come for me again, baby,” he huffed in her face, warm, “Let me feel you.” 

Her hips got jerky, her rhythm out of pace, the tilt of her pelvis wonky as she sought any angle to intensify the sensation of the base of his dick grinding against her clit. He sat forward in the armchair to pull her in closer, until their chests were flush, his arms wrapped around her, hugging, tight, strong. When she came it was like the world dropped out from under her – she could feel the tension and release of every single muscle, in a violent, colorful detail. She came so hard and for so long that there were tears in her eyes when it finally drew back, let her breathe. 

She was actually _crying_ , she realized, tears dripping down the bridge of her nose. Jesus Christ, couldn’t she pull it together? 

He noticed right away that something was off, pulled back immediately, saying, “Hey, you alright?” Smoothing the sweaty tendrils of her hair back out of her face, trying to soothe her, though clearly bewildered at this point, rubbing her back.

She stopped crying quickly, like a passing rain shower that lasted only moments – maybe it had been too much, maybe it had been nothing at all, but she kissed him, ready to pick back up where they’d left off. 

He pulled away to say, “Hey, take it easy, maybe we shouldn’t –”

But she kissed him again, firmly, sure, and he eventually kissed her back, but much more softly, setting the pace. It was nothing as feverish as what she was accustomed to. This was sweet, intimate, his lips testing hers, tongue coaxing, tasting. He held her close, palms soothing against her naked back, and they kissed for what felt like eons, until his stubble burned her chin, mustache grating against her upper lip. He grew hard again between them, having softened somewhere in the midst of the crying. 

He ducked his head to lick and kiss at her nipples, sucking them in between his teeth, biting down tenderly. She reached down between them to get him into her hand, squeezing around him, sitting up slightly on her knees to fit him against her entrance, sinking down onto him again as he groaned against her breast, a hand fisted in her hair. 

He guided her hips as she ground them against his, rocking in his lap, a rising, falling, rotation – kissed her, their breaths rising in tandem, panting, kissing her through it as another orgasm swept her up, threatening to shake her apart. His arms were around her, squeezing so tight, anchoring, keeping the pieces of her together as they strained to fly asunder. He came inside her, inside the condom, deep, as she shuddered around him, her forehead pressed to his, eyes full of his face, body full of his body. 

He continued to hold her, there in that leather armchair, through every full-body shiver, tight, even when it all became too intimate and she tried to squirm free of him, unsettled. His lips against her forehead, fingers twined in her hair.

“You alright?” he murmured, stroking her flushed cheek with his thumb.

She nodded. She was definitely more than alright. The crying jag was something that did not even bear examining, not now, not as he reached between them to delicately separate the condom from his body, to tie it at its end. She stood, shaky, to let him get up and move past her, down the hall and into the bathroom, where she heard water running, heard the toilet flush, just standing there naked, full body shuddering, not from any physical chill. 

“Help yourself – there’s a fresh toothbrush under the sink,” he said to her, leaving the light on as he exited, “I’ll go find you something to wear.”

She took his place in the bathroom, taking a careful inventory as she peed, wincing at the aches and stinging sensation which announced themselves then, once the wild rush of endorphins had drawn back, receding like some disorienting tide. Scrubbed distractedly at her teeth, spitting foamy mint, thinking, with a pang, about the stretch of him inside her.

Exiting the bathroom, she followed the only other light on in the apartment, down the hall to his bedroom, where he was dressed in dark blue boxers, rummaging through the top drawer of a large, dark wooden dresser to pull out a similar pair of boxers, but in forest green, a plain white t-shirt already draped over his shoulder. 

“Come here, baby,” he coaxed her deeper into the room, “Here,” he held open the shirt for her, at the hem, pulled it on over her head as she fit her arms in through the holes. He held out the boxers, too, at her feet, for her to step into. “These’ll probably fall off,” he warned her, hitching them up around her waist. 

He’d _dressed_ her. There was something almost… _paternal_ about it, like he’d changed, in the space of a few moments, from lover to father. She caught his gaze then, a little bewildered. His expression was as carefully guarded as she’d ever seen it.

“You alright?” he asked again.

She shrugged, said, “Fine.” He was looking in her eyes without really letting her see him, closed off, shutters drawn, and that irked her. He drew breath to speak, but she cut him off at the pass, sensing something horrible coming, “If you apologize to me, I will slit my own throat, so don’t.” 

“Sarah,” he said, chastising, brows drawn down together in the center. “That should never have happened. I should never have let things get so carried away,” he said. “You’re…” he trailed off, searching for the words.

“I’m _what_?” she demanded. “Pathetic? Ruined? A sad little fucking victim?” 

“Fragile,” he said, with a look in his eye like she was proving his point, carrying on the way she was. 

Her fists balled up so tight that her hands shook, but she would not lash out, would not hit him. _She_ was not that kind of person. The violence had touched her, had gotten its licks in, but she would _not_ let it become part of her. 

“You’ve got to be _bullshitting_ me,” she spit out, no less hateful for the vow not to turn physical, “I was finally in control of my own body for the first time in five _fucking_ years, and you have to go and _ruin_ it by being a whiny _fucking_ baby.”

“Come on,” he insisted, not a fan, apparently, of her fighting words. 

“Tell me you didn’t want to fuck me,” she demanded of him, harsh, loud, “Tell me you didn’t fucking love it.”

“You know I did,” he replied, at a much more reasonable volume, shaking his head.

“Then shut _up_ , Peña. Jesus,” she complained. 

“Don’t call me Peña,” he insisted, nose wrinkling, like she’d called him something insulting and not just by his last name. “My dick was inside of you ten minutes ago. Call me by my first fucking name.”

“Whatever you say, Agent,” she rolled her eyes. 

“You’re such a god damn brat,” he complained, shaking his head, turning to walk out of the room.

“Where are you going?” she called after him, a sharp spark of fear, something she immediately eschewed and refused to examine, at the thought of him potentially _leaving her_ , going away.

“To brush my fucking teeth. Get in bed,” he commanded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 😈


	17. XVII

He slept hot, slept close, curling in around her like she was a favored stuffed animal, arm a heavy anchor around her waist. Truly, she didn’t need any covers, such was the warmth radiating off of him. And that was a good thing, because he didn’t let her have any, hogging them all to himself. His sleeping breath was hot against her ear, humid, stirring the baby hairs at her temple. And yet, for all of that, the enumerated list of grievances she had with the manner in which he slept, she ruminated on her distaste for only minutes before an unexpected wave of sleep dragged her under, and didn’t relent. 

She woke still in his arms, her spine curled to fit the exact curve of his chest, realizing she’d slept better, practically suffocated in his embrace, than she had in _months_ on her own. No night terrors, no waking with a gasping, resuscitating breath, no tears on her face. Just a perfect gray, pure static blank. She was so relaxed, in fact, so perfectly boneless, that she nearly drifted back off…

But he awoke, then, with a deep, rested sigh, nuzzling closer for just one sleepy moment, nose to the soft patch right beneath her ear, squeezing tight around her waist, before achieving full consciousness, which saw him drawing back, propping himself up on his elbow just enough to deduce that she was also awake. 

“You snore, you know,” he said, voice rumbly with sleep. He heaved himself up to sit upright in bed, stretching, arms above his head, body lithe, all the covers in a pooling wind around his waist. 

“Like you’d know – you passed out the second your head hit the pillow,” she rolled her eyes, immediately testy, curling up tighter on her side, blocking him out bodily. Actually, she _hadn’t_ known. She cringed. It was all entirely too intimate, too _close_ for her comfort.

“Only when you’re on your back, though. Once I rolled you onto your side, you were quiet as a mouse,” he added, ignoring her jab, shucking the covers aside, back over her, to climb out of bed. He padded out of the room, down the hallway without another word.

She heard the low groan of the shower kicking on, and then she _did_ drift off, listening to the quiet, white-noise rush of the water against the tile, muffled through the wall. She woke what felt like only a blink later, to him standing in front of her, a towel secured around his waist. Christ, what right did he have to look that good in a towel?

“Shower’s yours, if you want it,” he offered, reaching in, it seemed almost unconsciously, to stroke her sleep-warm cheek. “I’m going to make some breakfast before I have to leave for work. You a fan of huevos rancheros?” 

“You cook?” she inquired, skeptical, squinting up at him, then rolling over onto her back, looking away, having to, because she could not _cope_ with the way he looked, glistening from the shower, hair wet. She had the impulse to start chasing water droplets with her tongue, a pang between her legs as she stretched, trying to shake it off. “Yeah, sure, I guess.” Actually no, she wasn’t really, a fan, but she refused to direct him to make something especially for her; something she wouldn’t, in all likelihood, end up eating. 

He went to the dresser to select something to wear, and she crawled out of bed before he could drop the towel to dress himself, knowing she’d embarrass herself somehow if she didn’t. As she went, she hitched up the boxers, which made a bid to slide free of her hips, almost tripping over her own feet on the high pile of the carpet. 

God, she _ached_. She’d be feeling him for days, probably. He should’ve come with a warning sign. She splashed water on her face at the sink, did what she could to scrub away the traces of eyeshadow and mascara that remained, ringing her eyes, in trails down her cheeks from the crying. Christ, the _crying_. Started the shower. He’d left her a towel, folded on the sink. 

Breakfast was ready when she emerged, fragrant and hot, the spicy scent of the salsa fresca coalescing with the nuttiness of fresh coffee, making her stomach roil, maybe with hunger, maybe with vomitous to come, it was hard to identify which. He was seated already, reading from a manila file, sipping from a mug. He looked up at her, scanned from the shoulders up, to the towel wound, turban like, around her hair. Pressed his lips together, tight, to stifle a smirk. 

“It’s rude to stare,” she told him, using her fork to nudge aside the sunny side up egg that topped her plate, careful not to burst the sun itself. 

“Apologies,” he said, insincere, turning back to his case file as she picked over her breakfast, taking microscopic bites. 

“What’re you going to tell them?” he asked her after a while of sitting together in quiet, in early morning light. He hadn’t looked away from his reading to address her, like it was a perfectly off-handed inquiry. 

“What do you mean?” she demanded, provoked, setting down her fork and pushing her plate away as her stomach spasmed, disapproving. 

“Will they be upset that you didn’t come home last night?” he clarified, looking at her now, over the top of the file, dark eyes neutral, flat. 

Would Nick’s family, who’d taken her in because they’d so pitied her for the agony she was in, mourning their son’s cold-blooded murder, be upset with her for staying out all night, sleeping over at the apartment of some _random_ man? She glared at him, void of response. Did the question even bear asking?

“What’s your plan?” he pressed, setting the file down, now, to command her attention squarely. “It’s not sustainable, you know, accepting their charity. They’re going to find out eventually that you didn’t really love their son. It might be better for both of you if they didn’t.” 

“You’re insufferable,” she said, pushing away from the table, turning her back on him to ferret out her dress, wherever it was that she’d discarded it the night previous. “It really has nothing to do with you.” She figured she’d put on the white shirt, over the dress, knotting it at the waist, and maybe only look half as much like a hooker. How she _felt_ , of course, was immutable. 

“I’m just curious,” he said, watching from the breakfast nook as she undressed in his living room, worming her way back into the dress with the zipper up, which was only a slightly tight squeeze. Anything to avoid the indignity of having to ask him to zip her up. 

“Why?” she demanded, huffing, tossing the damp towel-turban down onto the sofa as it came unwound. 

“Why do you think?” he snapped in return. He was irritated, too, now, which gave her pause. She glared over at him, completely bewildered, holding her hands up like, _‘I literally have no fucking clue.’_ “Was this just a one-night-stand for you?” he demanded, sharp. 

“Was that in any way unclear?” she scoffed, rolling her eyes, knotting her wet hair in on itself, into a low bun at her nape. 

“Well what if I didn’t want it to be?” he fired back. 

“What are you, some kind of psychopath? What could you possibly want from me? What do I fucking have to offer you?” she demanded of him, completely belligerent, completely astounded. Was he _deranged_? She was _homeless_! She wasn’t even in the country legally!

“It’s not _transactional_ , Sarah,” he rolled his eyes, reproving. “I like you, for whatever fucking reason. I want to see more of you. But I doubt very much that his parents will agree to house you if they find out you’re dating,” he explained all of this with an expression on his face that directly contradicted his assertion that he _liked_ her. She found it no less striking for its incongruity. He liked _what_ about her? That she was game to give it up after a single drink?

“What am I supposed to do?” she countered, dubious. It wasn’t as though she was staying with Nick’s family because she _enjoyed_ putting herself in such a position, holding herself out as a fraud. But where the fuck else could she go?

“Just…let me think of something, alright?” he requested, already evening out again, calm, “The embassy keeps quite a few unoccupied properties for safe houses, and for employee housing. I think…there’s a way I might be able to set something up.”

She didn’t see how accepting his charity would be any better, but she didn’t say anything. She knew there was nowhere else to turn, that she was out of outs. She was at the point where she would simply have to swallow her pride and take what she could get. In truth, the past five years hadn’t left her with much pride to speak of. And at least, when it came to Peña, she had something that she could offer him in return. 

“Come sit down, please,” he requested, “Finish your breakfast. I have to leave for work soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for the great response on the last chapter! Glad everyone enjoyed.


	18. XVIII

“I told Mami you left early to go to the farmer’s market,” Paola said, her dark, suspicious eyes on Sarah’s in the bathroom mirror, standing behind her as she washed the remaining traces of makeup from her face. Sarah had crept in the front door that morning, quiet as a mouse, only to find that the family had all gone on a day trip to the beach, save Paola, who’d stayed home, nursing a hangover. 

“Thanks for covering.” Sarah could tell they were both uneasy, hackles up, unsure of one another like two feral animals crossing paths on the street, sniffing out weakness and threat. 

“Who was that?” Paola asked next. The question Sarah had hoped she wouldn’t ask; that she’d known she would. She had hoped Paola would have been careless, self-centered enough, to leave the bar with her boyfriend without even remembering that Sarah had tagged along. But that sort of thing was more like Sarah than it was her. 

Sarah shrugged. “Some guy.” Nick’s family knew that his involvement with the cartel had brought about his demise, but they were not aware of the finer details of the DEA’s involvement, or hers. No part of her knew how to explain, or wanted to. What she and Peña had done was beyond words; it evaded explanation, even as she herself tried to make sense of it.

“I’m not going to tell them,” Paola told her simply, turning to leave her to clean herself up, to scrub herself free of her sins, “But I don’t think you should stay here anymore.”

-

“I should have asked you to pick up some potatoes at the farmer’s market, for dinner tonight,” Nick’s mother, Luz, commented as she set up a step stool in front of Nick’s wide-flung closet doors. She was on a spring cleaning tilt, her current object to make more space for Sarah’s scant belongings in Nick’s closet. “I’m glad you’re getting out of the house – it’s good for you to get some fresh air.” 

From Nick’s description of her, Sarah knew Luz to be a very bright woman. He always spoke of his mother with equal parts admiration and fear, describing how she could ferret out one of his lies from a mile. Sarah wondered if Luz knew her as well, could taste her falsehood with such accuracy. Still, she fed her Paola’s lie as easily as if it were the truth. 

“Yeah, the farmer’s market was really lovely,” Sarah said this as though she believed it herself, almost picturing it in her mind, this imagined, bustling marketplace, with its tented food stalls, arranged down a row, boasting colorful arrangements of fresh grown produce. She stared up at Luz from her perch at the foot of the bed as she climbed the step stool, ascending to the top shelf of the closet. 

God, she fucking _disgusted_ herself, but she just could not let it go, could not just fuck off and leave them alone, like she obviously should have to begin with. But somehow she had convinced herself that she could salvage this, that the previous night had only been a lonely, confused fluke, and that her feelings for Nick had been the only true, irrefutable thing. She was certain that if she just stayed with his family, just stuck it out, she could convince not only Paola but herself of this. That she could belong with their sweet, normal family for real. That wanting something to be true intensely enough could make it so.

Luz stepped down off the ladder, first, with a weighty cardboard box bearing no marker-scrawled inscription. “Hernan put all of this away when we first got the news,” she said of Nick’s father, “He knew I wouldn’t be able to look at it.” 

She unfolded the flaps of the box and Sarah saw why – it was full of photo albums and framed pictures of Nick as a child. Luz lifted out the first from the top of the stack – it depicted a smiling, sweet-faced little kid with dimples; one who played goalie on the neighborhood fútbol team, his blue mesh pinny oversized, dwarfing his small frame. His dark eyes sparkled, even then, with a delight Sarah recognized. Luz flipped next through a fabric-covered album, showing Sarah pictures of Nick as a newborn, red-faced with consternation, still in his hospital-provided, blue-striped knit cap, swaddled tight into glow-worm shape. A blank slate. A blameless, perfect creature that could’ve done and could’ve become anything. That now never would. 

If she'd had any suspicions that Luz was that particular shade of vindictive, Sarah almost would’ve believed that the woman knew exactly what a snake she was – that Luz had spotted the glint of her scales, the flick of her tail as she moved through the grass – and that she showed Sarah these things with a purpose; to overwhelm her with shame and regret. But looking into the tear-wet sheen of her eyes, which were creased with time and sorrow, Sarah knew this was not the case. 

“He was such a good boy,” Luz said, sighing, flipping past kindergarten picture day snapshots, his dark hair slicked down at the part, a stubborn cowlick curlicuing at the back of his head. “So smart. He wanted to be a police officer when he was a little boy.” 

Flipping through more pages, it was almost like a moving picture book of a young boy’s journey into adolescence. Nick grew taller, lankier, his face lost the fattish plumpness of youth, his cheekbones and jaw carving out their own relief. And his eyes. You could almost watch the childlike wonder, the blind idealism, bleed from his eyes like a ghost of a former self, replaced with something a little harsher, a little more guarded. 

“Things really changed in high school,” Luz said, sighing, pausing on a snapshot of Nick at the beach, sitting by on a brightly colored towel, squinting unhappily in the sun, as his siblings built a sandcastle nearby – the quintessential surly teenager. “He stopped playing football, stopped making good grades, got caught up in the wrong crowd. Such a cliché. But the cartel doesn’t just pray on the kids who are alone, who have no one. It takes the smart ones too. I know Hernan blames himself sometimes – we didn’t have the money to buy Nick a car, could never buy the kids every fancy new thing they had their eye on. Maybe if we had, Nick never would’ve been enticed by the money the cartel was promising him. I just can’t think like that,” she sighed, shaking her head, forcing the thought out as quickly as it had come. Closing that door before anything more awful could come through. 

“I never got the impression that he felt like you guys had denied him anything, or had fallen short in some way,” Sarah said, the only small, paltry thing she could fathom to even begin to touch the pain she could see in Luz’s eyes. “I only ever heard him talk about how much he loved you guys – how he wanted to give you the world.”

“He was still such a good boy, even then,” Luz said, sighing, closing the album and setting it aside. “I remember he used to promise me that I didn’t need to worry. He told me he wasn’t getting in over his head, that he knew where the line was. He was just a driver – he never touched the dangerous side of things.”

Sarah thought about how this might’ve been the truth; that as a driver Nick had been in fairly little danger. But he had not remained a driver for long. Because in a twist of fate that had doomed them both, Alejandro had dragged her to Colombia, and she had pulled Nick into her orbit, somehow. And then Nick had done anything he could to see her, dreamed up any excuse to be around her, schemed to get himself assigned to Alejandro’s personal security detail so that he would have a reason to hang around the finca. 

She was the siren that had lured him out into deeper waters, left him vulnerable to the rising waves.

The last thing Luz drew out of the cardboard box was a small, red silk pouch. Inside it was a ring. It was clearly vintage – had a thin, golden band upon which was set a small, parquet-shaped emerald, adorned on either side by tiny diamonds. 

“This was my mother’s engagement ring,” she said, “Nick was asking me about it, before…” Sarah may have thought that Luz was handling her grief with much more grace than she herself had managed thus far, but Luz still, nonetheless, could not complete that particular sentence. Not for the world. “He was hoping to give it to you. To propose to you, once the two of you made it out.” Her eyes streamed with tears now, creeping along the bridge of her nose. She held the ring out to Sarah. “You should take it. He would have wanted you to have it.” 

Sarah’s initial reaction to the offering was a visceral, forceful rejection. It burned a scalding path up her throat like reflux, the impulse to tell Luz everything, to watch every ounce of sympathy and kindness leave her eyes, to be replaced with the disdain and mistrust that rightfully belonged there. It took everything in her to stifle it, to demur gently instead, mentioning that from what she’d seen at the bar, it was quite possible that Paola might be the next to marry. Certainly, she told Luz, what Nick would’ve wanted most was for his sister to keep such a precious heirloom in the family, keep it close. And if Paola ended up wanting to choose her own ring, or Joseph had already selected one, they could always revisit the conversation.

But that night she stole out under the stars, plodding down the street, enrobed in shadows, to the grocery at the corner, where she picked up the pay phone set into a stall outside, and dialed Peña’s number.


	19. XIX

“My number is programmed in – it’s the only one, so call me if you need anything.” 

They stood at the threshold together, toe to toe; hers bare, his in leather loafers – he was on his way out, heading to work, aviator sunglasses perched atop his head. He’d just handed her a burner, a little silver flip phone, pre-paid with a certain number of minutes, his name the only entry under ‘Contacts.’ It reminded her of the first cell-phone she’d ever had, with its little plastic buttons and minuscule, ten-pixel screen. At eleven, she’d thought herself the coolest sixth grader in the world, imagining it made her important, mature, to hold that phone in her hand, like a little electronic bird. 

“I’ll come by after work – we can do dinner,” he promised, reaching in to cup her chin, to stroke his thumb across her bottom lip. They could _have sex_ , she thought, amending his statement in her head. Because that was the trade off she was really making, wasn’t it?

“You’re safe here,” he insisted, a low soothe, reaching up to smooth the furrow from her brow, taking her face in his hands to kiss. It was such a _familiar_ thing, to be kissed like that. Uncanny. She caught the slight dip in his eyebrows that said he wasn’t totally sure why he’d done it, either. “Don’t worry.”

The apartment door closed behind him and she was alone. 

She stood in the entryway, staring out into the studio apartment, uneasy, unfamiliar. It was a nice apartment, really, if a little severe in its whiteness, a fresh coat of paint over everything, covering up all traces of whoever had inhabited it before her. There was a double bed with a dark blue bedspread, a nightstand and lamp, a gray loveseat with thin, hard-looking cushions, and a small TV on a stand. The kitchen was clean, empty, with bright linoleum and painted-over cabinets, light laminate countertops, two stools pulled up to the island, which looked out into the rest of the room. More than she could’ve afforded herself, undeniably. But nothing in comparison to the hacienda. Nothing would ever be quite the same. 

The quiet of the apartment only exacerbated her unease, electrifying it, until it was like marching rows of ants crawled her skin. She could hear every ambient noise – the whir of the refrigerator’s motor, the muffled thump of footsteps overhead, the chirping of birds outside on the telephone wires. Every new sound sent a lance of panic through her. She was like a scared animal, tensed in constant anticipation of a threat, and she _hated_ it. She turned on the TV for the noise, to drown the rest of it out, but didn’t watch it. 

She was thinking about Nick. Thinking about his mother’s wide eyes, glassy with unshed tears as she clutched at the tiny cross pendant around her neck, as she bid Sarah goodbye, kissing her cheeks a hundred times over; the smell of her perfume, of rose oil, thick in Sarah’s nostrils as she pulled her in close. Thinking about how her loss would become more real without Sarah around, without the distraction of her loss, her need, cloying in the air, commanding all the attention. Thinking about how she’d never deserved an ounce of Luz’s sympathy. 

Sarah knew that Nick had loved her. Had been acutely aware of it, had used it to her advantage at every opportunity. The puppet master, pulling all his strings. At the time, part of her had felt like he deserved it – like he knew what he was doing, just the same as she did. After all, she was the very definition of a captive audience. She’d felt justified in playing him, so long as he was also playing her. But meeting his mother had made her realize that maybe, to him, none of it had ever been a game. And that, the idea that he had felt something deeper for her, was not something she was willing or able to confront. 

The quiet grew so loud it was almost deafening, roaring in her ears. The more she focused on it, the louder it became. Every sound became footsteps outside the door, became the cocking of a pistol, became the turn of a lock. She pulled the comforter from the bed, the pillow, and dragged them both into the closet, where she shut the door, curled up on the floor, and went to sleep. It was like a new super power, or a new curse – the ability to sleep for a thousand years, without ever being sated. 

She dreamt of Alejandro’s face. Dreamt of the two of them, in prison together, of him hovering over her in the dark of the cell, of his palm secured over her mouth, the guards standing by, the muzzles of their guns resting on their forearms, gazes turned away. She could _feel_ him inside of her, feel the remembered weight of his body over hers. She drew breath to scream but couldn’t make a sound, like her vocal chords had been slashed. She was suffocating in the fear, but she was on the brink of orgasm, still, a breath away from doom…

She woke with a start, with a ragged gasp, as light flooded in the open closet door. Squinting in the brightness, she saw dark hair and began to cry, seized with terror and something else, something unidentifiable, maybe _hopeful_ ; thinking for a disorienting moment that the dream had not been a dream at all. Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw Peña’s face, the creases between his brows, the concern, pooling in the dark of his eyes.

“Fuck,” she cursed, tearful, burying her face in the pillow, willing her heart to relent in its insane, out of time beat. 

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he said at the same time, squatting down beside her, reaching out to cup the back of her head, hesitant, like he was reaching into a fire, like her pain, her fear, would jump from her skin to his. 

“Jesus, ring a bell or something!” she complained, cleaving to frustration, to indignation, to quell the crying, the pathetic simpering that had him looking bewildered and put off, like he had no fucking idea what to do. He probably didn’t. 

“Why are you in the closet?” he asked her, the obvious question, but nonetheless not one she particularly wanted to answer. Her face still buried in the pillow, she sucked back the tears, the snot, pulling herself back together. “Sarah, look at me,” he insisted. She did, eventually, and he took her tear-wet face in his hands, holding it reverentially, like a jewel. “You’re safe here. I promise you. Okay?”

She nodded, though thinking that safe was something she’d never be again, that safe was something she’d forfeited, over five years ago now. And though Peña may have been safe, though he may have represented it intrinsically, her being with him leeched that away, like she was a poison.

He’d brought back takeout for dinner and they ate together in front of the TV, watching a blockbuster action film dubbed in Spanish, the actors’ mouths out of step, ill fitting the words. 

There was a tension between them now, impossible to ignore, an awkwardness that made them strangers, that made them perch beside one another on the stiff foam couch cushions like public bus passengers sharing a seat during rush hour, loath to brush elbows. She could identify but could not fathom how to bridge the distance between them. 

It seemed clear to her that her outburst in the closet had called his attention, again, to her brokenness, her oddness. She was not a normal girlfriend, not a normal person, even, and he did not appear to know how to act around her now. They’d gone about everything the wrong way, maybe under necessity, but it was wrong all the same. They’d tied their fates together after only one night, like a couple fallen pregnant after a one-night stand, total strangers trying to cobble together some kind of life, and the pressure of it was more than either one of them could reasonably withstand. 

She could only imagine that he regretted ever having made the offer to put her up in the apartment. Really, she struggled to fathom why he _had_ made it, in the first place. He had not ever seemed to her a soft enough man to be ruled by baser emotions like pity. And yet what more was there to possibly explain it, this sense of his that he was in some way tethered to her, bound to keep her off the streets? 

They didn’t go to bed together that night – he went home after the movie’s end, citing a need to be up early the next morning for work, not kissing her goodbye. She didn’t sleep, gripped by paroxysms of anxiety and fear, straining to listen for every creak and sigh of the building, staring unblinking into the absolute dark of the room, watching the play of shadows, trying to identify shapes but catastrophizing, seeing the worst things her mind could conjure up. 

Eventually, when it became clear that sleep would not come, she eased from bed, spent the remainder of the night, well into the wee hours, cataloguing and memorizing the locations of various items that could be wielded as tools of self-defense, should there ever come a need.


	20. XX

“The girl at the bookstore recommended those,” Peña said, watching Sarah’s expression with rapt attention as she flipped through one of two adult coloring books he’d brought home to her, the cover of which boasted over one hundred flower designs. “She said they help her with anxiety.” 

Sarah looked up at him, studying his eyes just as intently, gauging his seriousness. In appearance, he was perfectly earnest in his offering, no hint of mocking in the dark of his eyes. And yet…yet she felt nothing but wrathful, as though she could claw those eyes free of their sockets, leave behind a bloodied ruin. He expected a _fucking coloring book_ to put right all that was apparently wrong with her? She hated him a little in that moment, for the first time in a long time, a feeling that bubbled up inside of her like reflux. He understood _nothing_ about her, about what she was going through, and that was a betrayal, somehow, though she knew she could not confidently profess to know any more about him, about the inner war of his mind. 

She put aside the coloring book and colored pencil set, before they drove her to some kind of overreaction, spent a few minutes, as he plated the takeout dinner he’d picked up, pawing through the plastic drugstore bag of other sundries he’d brought over, things he’d forgotten to supply, like conditioner, face wash, razors and shaving cream. The face wash was…wrong, not exactly what she’d requested, but passable. It would do. And beggars couldn’t very well be choosers. Really, she couldn’t identify what had her so on edge, finding fault with everything, cleaving to dissatisfaction like a favorite companion. Could she not simply be grateful that this man was _housing_ her?

“How was your day?” she asked him. They picked at their plates, side by side at the kitchen island, instead of in front of the TV. She felt compelled, therefore, to conjure up some sort of conversation, to keep them from expiring in the stifling quiet, which clung all around them like a deafening shroud. The inquiry rolled across, dry as a tumbleweed.

“Good,” he nodded. There was a pregnant pause, one in which he was literally chewing, but also seemed to be figuratively chewing over something, maybe whether to say more, or what more to say. 

“What are you working on now?” she offered as a prompt. 

“Your – um, the same case,” he said, stumbling over it, apparently at odds with whether it was appropriate to refer to it as “her” case. It wasn’t as though it had nothing to do with her, obviously. And yet…she wouldn’t have exactly called it “hers.” But neither would she have preferred it if he called it Alejandro’s case, invoking his name in a space so painstakingly void of him, of his mention. “There’s…quite a bit of paperwork to be done, to wrap things up.” 

She nodded as though she understood perfectly, how such a thing worked. After all, he didn’t seem in any great hurry to explain it to her. “And once that’s done, it’s over?” Over. Would it ever be over?

“Well…not exactly,” he hedged, “There are other indictments. Other extraditions we’re seeking.” Silence stretched out between them like a road, pitted, uneven. She waited for him to elaborate, irked by his hesitation to provide any further detail. 

It bothered her for a very specific reason, his reluctance to discuss his job with her at any great length. It read, to her, as his being suspicious of her, in general, as though he still, largely, saw her as one of _them_ , someone whose allegiances he could not be certain of. And why, if he felt that way about her, did he still deign to fuck her, to house her? As for the former, she guessed he really hadn’t. Not since that first time, which felt, now, like practical eons ago. Like two completely separate people. Like another age. 

“How was your day?” he returned the volley, bringing another forkful to his lips. 

This, if possible, made her feel even _more_ thorny. How did he _think_ her day had been? What, exactly, did he think it was she _did_ all day? What was there, even, to do? It seemed almost…impolite, to ask such a question of her. He’d only just given her the coloring books – she didn’t even have a Crayola artwork to show for herself, to hang proudly on the fridge. “Good,” she said anyway. 

The meal drew to a tense, quiet close and they drifted into the kitchen to clean up, elbow to elbow, nearly, in the narrowness of the space, scraping food off of plates, rinsing them, a methodical, silent tidying.

“Did you have breakfast or lunch?” he asked her, peering into the empty dishwasher as he slotted their plates down into it. 

“Yeah,” she replied, but didn’t elaborate. 

His query went no further – he filed the last plate away and closed the dishwasher door with a snap, with the sound of rushing water as it kicked on. They meandered into the living room, then, turned on the TV, to stare at it silently, side by side, for a while. It was ludicrous, maybe, but she wasn’t sure if she could touch him, even, if that was something he would bear, let alone want. She had to, though, had to do something, had to reach a tentative hand into the distance between them, attempt to bore her way through. 

She reached across his lap for his belt buckle. He put his hand over hers, a gentle, though definite interception, as her fingers met the cool metal of it. 

“Please,” she said softly, turning toward him on the couch, eyes wide and beseeching, “Let me.” If nothing else, she could give him this. If he wouldn’t touch her, she would touch him. After all, it was her end of the bargain, the only thing that would keep her from feeling like she was taking complete advantage of the situation. 

There was a definite trepidation in the dark of his eyes, one that was not altogether encouraging, but he took his hand away, allowed her to unfasten his belt, unzip his fly, slip her hand beneath his waistband. It was like touching a stranger all over again, somehow. She got a fist around him, drew it up, drawing him free of his fly, and he groaned, a quiet, almost non-sound, a breath. She gave him a squeeze, a little too tight, maybe, arguably, and he groaned again, sharper. Fuck, what a sound. He was so fucking beautiful, and she wanted so desperately for him not to simply tolerate her touching him; wanted him to _want_ her to touch him, for him to _beg_ her to touch him, wanted him deeply in her thrall. 

She slid to her knees before him on the couch, coming up between the straddle of his thighs, feeling the muscles of them tensing beneath his jeans, under her palms. She leaned in to stick her tongue out, to taste him, licking along the length of him. He was hardening, already, filling out in her fist, pulsing, a steady throb against the circle of her fingers. She broadened the sweep of her tongue over the glans, which beaded already at its tip, licking free that telling glistening pearl. 

“You’re fucking killing me, sweetheart,” he hissed, an almost pained pucker between his brows as she continued to explore him, memorizing every contour with her tongue. 

She grinned at the thought, encouraged, ducking back down to take him into her mouth. She took him in deep, as near to the base as she could get without broaching her throat, and sucked. She heard his knuckles crack as he clenched his fists. This was familiar territory, to her. She had been here before, but his fingers, as they threaded into her hair, felt so different, felt so careful, like he was taking special pains not to get entangled, not to pull unpleasantly. He was throbbing against her tongue, filling out her mouth almost obscenely, broaching her throat before she’d even reached the midway point of him. 

She bobbed her head, taking him deeper, into the wet clutch of her throat, then pulled back, concentrating on the head, sucking it, running her tongue along the crown, her fist slick, pumping at what her mouth couldn’t reach without interrupting her breathing. He was a veritable treasure trove of sounds and reactions – sighs and soft groans and gasps, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes shut tight, head tilted back. It was all a kind of sustenance for her; a fruit of her labor.

“I’m gonna come, querida, _please_ ,” he warned her, deadly low, voice deliciously strained. She didn’t relent. He filled her mouth, pulse after pulse, groaning, low, and she swallowed it down with a learned enthusiasm, licking her lips.

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, collapsed against the couch cushions as though he could sink through them, boneless with rapture. 

After a while, after he’d recovered, tucking himself away, refastening his jeans, she asked him whether he was going to stay with her that night. 

Though she’d given him time to catch his breath, it wasn’t lost on her, that it was a little unfair to ask him anything in that moment, after such a performance. Obviously the result would be biased, skewed toward ‘ _anything you want, dear_.’ But maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she just wanted him to stay, regardless of how she accomplished it. His body wrapped around hers, a security blanket to help her sleep, would be no less warm for the coercion it had taken to get him there. 

“Do you want me to?” he asked. She nodded. “Okay then, sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🔥


	21. XXI

She dreamt she was sitting alone at a bar, perched tall on a creaking leather stool – waiting for something. She wasn’t sure what, but she could feel the anticipation crawling in her blood. The light in the room was low and orange, the bar-top dark and polished, the floors sticky, peanut-shell strewn, wood planked. Her bones ached with the familiarity of the place, to which she was not a stranger, even in dreams. 

Behind the bar was a face she knew. Had known. The first and only employer she’d ever had, Rust. He looked like a long-haired, disapproving crow, with those same rapt, shrewd eyes, which cut through her as he slid her a beer, unspeaking. She tipped it toward him in salute – he brought his perpetual Pall Mall to his lips, taking a long drag, turning back to watching the game with the two stooped, gray-haired men who she remembered, too, who had come in every night, without fail, thunderhead or placid sky, who’d sat in the same place at the far edge of the bar, always, as though they’d been planted there, as though they’d sprung up out of the cracked leather of the stools like some sort of fungus.

There was a rift in the dream, a schism, and then _she_ was the one behind the bar, serving, rinsing out glasses, dumping empty beer bottles into the recycling, the sound of it like hail on a tin roof.

The front door swung open then, the dark placidity of the parking lot and the blanket of the night sky outlining the figure who came forward into the bar. He was a shadow, a figure in all chiaroscuro, indefinite until he was close enough to touch. Their gazes met as he stepped into the bar-light dim, and she could scarcely take a breath, a feeling like her ribs would cave.

This was another shade of a memory. The night she’d met Alejandro.

“A beer, please,” he requested. His voice was soft, dulcet, just the scarcest edge of an accent at the syllables. That voice lived inside of her head, lived inside of the quiet, every moment she believed that she was alone. Every line of his face she had memorized, down to the slightest creases around his eyes, down to the particular honeyed hazel shade of them. 

She cracked the cap off the first bottle her fingers felt out in the cooler, slid it down in front of him, onto a cocktail napkin. “Three bucks.” She looked up into his face, again, as she said it, and it was Peña, not Alejandro, whose fingers wrapped around the beer, tugging it free of hers. Peña’s warm, molten eyes she was drowning in. The atmosphere had shifted, melting in around the two of them until they stood together in the bar where _they’d_ last met. He reached out to her, the hand that was not gripping the beer, to touch her cheek, but couldn’t reach her, as though they drifted further from one another by the moment, two ships set adrift…

She woke with a start, in a panic, sprawled across the bed in a sweaty tangle of sheets and limbs, the valley of her spine and the hair at the nape of her neck damp with a chilling dread sweat that plastered the t-shirt she’d slept in to her body. Peña’s side of the bed had gone cold already, the satiny cool of the sheets leeching the sleeping fever from her skin. He’d probably risen at some ungodly hour for work, surrendered her to the grips of some god awful nightmare.

Even in full consciousness the panicked edge would not relent – her heart thudding off-tempo still, her pulse heightened, a roaring in her ears. She sat down at the kitchen island with her coloring book, attempting to focus on the full-page black and white illustration of a burgeoning succulent garden, selecting various greens with which to shade in the desert plant-life. But despite the glowing recommendation of Peña’s bookstore girlfriend, even the soothing monotony of the activity could not touch the anxiety – it hovered in her chest like a hideous plume, stagnant. 

With the walls narrowing in around her, squeezing down like a vice, the only real solution seemed to be to vacate the apartment, occupy herself elsewhere, in a place where the walls were static. Being out in the open, in the world, had its own dangers, a risk she weighed for quite some time before taking the plunge, stepping out into daylight. 

The sky outside was a cool, vacant blue, with cobweb wisps of clouds scudding past, marring its perfect expanse. The sun warmed her skin, haloed her crown as she walked the few meandering blocks to the neighborhood grocery store; the only destination, even after careful deliberation, she could think of. She supposed she would pick up a few items, spend the remainder of the afternoon cobbling together some kind of dinner for herself and Peña, should he deign to stop by that night. If nothing else, it would occupy idle hands, a not so idle mind. 

The neighborhood tienda was busy in mid-afternoon, loud with activity, with carts making their metallic, clunky way down narrow aisles. But she found what she was looking for without tremendous difficulty, the layout of the store fairly intuitive. It had occurred to her on the walk over that she didn’t exactly know what Peña _liked_ , but she really only knew one recipe by heart – chicken pot pie; a dish she’d made a handful of times with her father as a child, standing up on a kitchen chair to reach the counter, pudgy hands digging into a floured ball of dough, kneading. So, pot pie it would be. 

She stood pondering brands of chicken stock for a fair few moments, indecisive, and as she did, she felt a presence at her left elbow, someone hovering in close, too close, perhaps needing to access the shelves she’d planted herself in front of. She turned her head, slightly, prepared to slide out of the way, and locked eyes with a man who’d been staring at _her_ rather than the assorted cans of beef and vegetable stock. 

“Too many choices, eh?” he said lightly, speaking to her in Spanish, as she looked immediately away, ducking her head, feeling, for whatever reason, that to stare at him for any longer, give him any more of an opportunity to look directly at her face, would be a grave mistake. 

In the momentary glance she’d caught of him, she’d seen that he was decently tall, dressed unremarkably, in dark jeans and a t-shirt, a pair of shiny, polarized sunglasses tucked into his collar. Nothing particularly threatening about him, except that he was a man, and yet…her hackles were up. Maybe unnecessarily. But decidedly so. Her body was tensed, gearing up for inevitable flight. 

She nodded, a silent agreement, staring at the cartons of chicken stock with an undue intensity, like one might simply come alive and jump into her basket, save her the trouble of selecting. 

“Are you American?” the man asked. She could feel his gaze on the side of her face, could feel her cheeks and ears beginning to heat up, to burn from the searing intensity of it. 

There was something unsettling about it, that she hadn’t said a single word to him, and yet he had pinned her immediately as an outsider, a tourist. Perhaps he was seeking someone in particular, and, in speaking to her, was simply confirming his mark, keeping her in place as some elaborate plan of extraction was set into motion. This possibility made her blood pressure spike, jackrabbit heart pumping wildly in her chest, eyes darting down the aisle, steeling herself for the attempted escape. 

_He knew who she was. He’d been sent for her. The clock had run out._

“Canada,” she corrected him, the sound eking free in a strangled breath. If her Caribeño accent was halting and awkward, any other accent she might’ve attempted to put on, to pretend she was from somewhere else in the world, would’ve been even more telling. So, Canadian it was. 

“Canada,” he repeated, as though slightly awed. His tone nearly made her question the decidedly catastrophic turn to her thoughts. Perhaps he’d only approached her because this area of Cartagena didn’t see as many visitors as the resort areas, right on the coast. Or was there – or was she just imagining this – an edge of disbelief in his tone, like he didn’t necessarily _believe_ her? “Where in Canada are you from?”

“Toronto,” she responded immediately, easily. The first Canadian city to come to mind. She could only pray he did not ask for any more of a detailed account of her origins than that. She had never even been to Canada; the most she would’ve been able to conjure for him would’ve been tellingly empty stereotypes of hockey and maple syrup. 

“Oh, Toronto? I have a cousin who lives in Toronto. He says it’s beautiful, but expensive,” this observation was left to percolate a while, during which time the most she could muster was a hollow chuckle, like _‘Don’t I know it?’_ The conversation might naturally have concluded there, but he pressed on, asking, “What brings you to Colombia?” 

He seemed excessively curious, to her, for someone striking up a casual, innocuous conversation with a stranger in a grocery store. Or did he? Could she really claim to have any clue what was aberrant, atypical, when it had been so many years since she’d existed in normal society? Maybe people spoke this way to one another all the time; maybe it was perfectly ordinary to be this curious about a stranger.

“Visiting friends,” she said. Perhaps the most cardinal rule of existing in this world as a woman. Never let anyone know that you’re alone, that no one is waiting for you, will miss you if you happen to disappear. It was a mistake she had only made once, with grievous result, and would not make lightly again. “Excuse me, I should go. They’re waiting for me.” 

She stood there, tense as a tripwire, practically sick with the anticipation of his response to this brush-off. What she was expecting was not a question with an easy answer. Perhaps the blunted nose of a glock, pressed right up against her spine? The subtle prick of the pointed end of a switchblade, nudged up under the hem of her t-shirt, aimed for her liver? His voice in her ear, harsh, low, warning her to follow him silently from the store, or else?

Instead, the only response that came from the man was this: “Sure, sure. Have a good day.” 

She turned to go, to sweep from the aisle, forcing herself to walk normally when her body ached to break out into a sprint, full tilt, a coiled spring finally released. When the man called out after her, “Wait, señora,” she froze, a sensation in her throat like she’d swallowed a stone, which sank all the way down into the pit of her stomach, heavy. It was really no surprise. Of course she wouldn’t get away so easily. “You forgot your broth.”

-

Outside, it took time before she could breathe freely again, in more than involuntary pulls and staccato gasps. Took time, until she had made her way well down the street, before she could finally convince herself that she had overreacted, excessively jumpy, to the man making small-talk in the grocery store aisle. And it was only then that she finally looked up and outside of herself and realized that she did not recognize the street she walked on, almost as though she had been plucked out of the sky by some phantom force, deposited in an entirely other realm. 

The market had been only three turns away from the apartment – a left, right, and another left. But she could not identify, at this point, which of those turns she’d flubbed. She had left her cell phone in the apartment, so she couldn’t send out a distress call to Peña, either – wasn’t sure, even, whether she would have done so, particularly as a first resort. It seemed exceedingly pathetic, to have to call him at work to come retrieve her because she’d gotten lost mere _blocks_ from home. 

But neither could she stop any of the people she saw on the street, bustling by on the sidewalk, parcels of shopping in hand, to ask for directions. She had neglected to ask, let alone memorize the address of the apartment, and any descriptors she might’ve given to indicate the area would’ve been laughably vague. 

She passed by a café and paused, momentarily, on the edge of the sidewalk, staring out into the street, trying to identify something familiar, something which would leap out at her, announcing itself as a landmark. A man sitting at a small, wrought-iron table outside the café, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper, looked up over the top of his paper to regard her with creased-forehead concern, asking her in Spanish if she was alright, if she needed directions to someplace. 

Looking back at him, staring into the half-moon slices of his eyes, behind sunglasses, which were visible over the newspaper, she was hit with a wave of the uncanny that caught her breath in her chest. _Was he…?_ He couldn’t possibly have been the same man who had talked to her in the grocery store. No. He couldn’t have been. She had barely looked at that man, and didn’t trust her own memory of him at this point, especially now that her anxiety about the whole thing, and about being lost in an unfamiliar place, had ratcheted up to a nearly unbearable level, making her catastrophize at every turn, thinking the worst with every breath. 

He was just another kindly stranger, noticing a person in apparent distress, trying to offer assistance. It made perfect sense and yet there was nothing in the world that could make her believe it. 

“I’m okay,” she assured him, laughing a little, slightly shakily, slightly unhinged, “Thank you for asking.” 

She hurried along before she could drive herself insane with it, her own fears of being followed, of being hunted like wild game, backed into a corner, outsmarted. Found herself, eventually, at the beach, which told her only that she had walked in exactly the wrong direction, for much too long. 

She walked down the shore a ways regardless, sank down into the sand, which was buttery-yellow and hot, slipping into her flip flops, burning against the soles of her feet. She sat there, deflated, staring out at the waves, the water a lucent, perfect turquoise, the dark, craggy shadows of the rocks beneath the surface in just visible outcroppings. 

She thought about how, in the early days, she had gone down to the shore at the hacienda, around which the hills rose up, verdant and green, surrounding the small cove on all three sides, as though the ocean had carved out just enough space for the finca, nothing more. She had stared out into that water, then, and imagined that one day, when no one was watching, she would simply slip into the water, unnoticed, eel-like, and swim away, never needing to surface for air. She would swim all the way to US shores, surface born anew like Botticelli’s Venus. But that escape, like every other she planned, had simply never come to fruition. There was always someone watching, some unavoidable eye, some fisherman’s net cast out over her to reel her back in. 

Eventually, she pulled herself up out of the sand and headed back the way she’d come, finally locating the correct streets to lead her back to the apartment, which stood out to her, now, almost like a painted path, making her wonder how it was she’d ever missed them. 

As she made her way up the walkway to the apartment door, a small red car parked alongside the street caught her eye. It was sitting there, idling with the engine on, windows rolled down. This, though somewhat unusual, was not the thing that had garnered her attention. She’d looked over at the car for one reason only: because inside of it sat a man smoking a cigarette and reading a folded over paper, the ghostly shape of the cigarette smoke taking form and rolling out the open window, rising in the air in a greyish plume.

She didn’t look any closer, just hurried inside, slamming the door at her back so hard that the glass shuddered within its panes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://youtu.be/LJQVyvaQf-4


	22. XXII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Felt like I owed y'all a little Peña, since he wasn't in the last chapter, so I'll just go ahead and post this.

The apartment door yawned open as she approached it, just a crack, the light from within spilling out into the hallway, a filtered luminescence. The well of panic, of fear inside of her, what felt like an unending chasm of it, threatened overflow until she heard it: the low, smooth tenor of Peña’s voice, distinctive and familiar, like a salve. 

Inside, he paced tracks into the threadbare carpeting, cell phone to his ear, body posture tense and upright, coiled in some way, with some kind of frenetic energy. He turned on his heel to face her as she came in the door, and immediately interrupted whoever was on the other end of the line, telling them that he had to go; that she’d just come back. 

“Who was that?” she asked him, finding it hard to believe there was anyone he could be talking to; that there existed anyone knew who she was, let alone what the two of them were doing together. It seemed to her, without him ever explicitly having said so, that there was a level of discretion necessary in the arrangement. 

“Where the hell were you?” Peña demanded in return, instead of answering. 

“I went to the store,” she said, setting her grocery bag down on the counter, to illustrate. “I thought I’d make us dinner.” 

“Where’s your phone?” he asked, not comforted by this, by any degree, it seemed.

“I left it here,” she said. She felt caught out, in trouble like a child, and the sick anticipation of his reaction, his retribution, was an old, familiar friend, come to crouch inside her chest once more. She didn’t really think Peña would _hurt_ her, of course. And yet, there was a certain level of discomfort, of punishment, in being forced to weather that he was out of sorts with her. After all, he was all that she _had_. Being out of his favor was almost like not existing. 

“You didn’t think it might be a good idea to bring it, so that when I came home and you weren’t here I didn’t think you’d been fucking abducted?”

It _hadn’t_ occurred to her, actually, that he might worry about her, that showing up and not finding her there would be anything other than puzzling to him. “I forgot it,” she said, trying not to sound as bewildered as she was, trying not to let on that she didn’t know how to do this; how to let someone _actually_ care about her wellbeing. 

“Look, one of our CIs heard something through the grapevine about you, alright? It’s not a great idea for you to be roaming around alone right now,” he revealed with a certain amount of reluctance, sighing. The high strung, nervous energy drained out of him, a resignation in his eyes as he laid out the cards he’d been holding close to his chest, flat on the table. 

“What did they hear?” she asked, her blood running cold, slowing. 

“He’s been writing letters from prison, asking for you to be brought to the states as soon as possible. He doesn’t know that you’re missing,” Peña explained, watching the turn in her expression as she digested this, taking in all that it meant, watching the fear and confusion flash, alternating, in her eyes like a strobe. 

“I’m _missing_?” she repeated, taken aback. 

“Luciana Herrera is missing. Officially, she was abducted from a DEA safe house. Hasn’t been seen since,” he clarified. 

She was completely awed by this, floundering, struggling to put the pieces together. Had he orchestrated her literal disappearance, just to protect her from having to testify? It was so… _bewildering_ , so out of step with everything she’d seen of him, to think that someone in his line of work could still be so… _soft centered_. 

So perhaps it was something else entirely. Perhaps he and Detective Murphy had taken some wrong turn in their operation, done something that wasn’t totally by the book, and thus _needed_ to make her disappear; _needed_ her to be unavailable to testify. Maybe they’d gone scorched earth and she simply hadn’t been bright enough to recognize that she was now sitting in the ashes. 

She stared into Peña’s face, into the soft lines around his eyes, into the earthen warmth of his irises, and wondered whether she could really trust him. Wondered if she knew a single thing about his motivations, about his feelings. Could he not have taken her in for some reason other than that he liked having her around? Could he have done it to protect his career, to save _himself_?

“But the DEA isn’t looking for me,” she clarified. It wasn’t a question, because she knew they were not. Could not have been. 

“The DEA…has bigger fish to fry,” Pena answered, a purposefully delicate way of saying that Luciana Herrera had conveniently slipped through the cracks, once it had become apparent that she wasn’t, in truth, a vital component of the case. “The cartel, however…” he trailed off, searching for words of an appropriate severity, “It’s difficult to say, whether anyone’s still taking Herrera’s orders, now that he’s in prison.”

Of course she had figured that it was a possibility, that someone was actively looking for her. After all, why else would she have been jumping at shadows, all of these past months? But when nothing had materialized in all that time, the immediacy of the concern had somewhat faded into the background, becoming a looming specter she could ignore, if she chose to, force into an unvisited corner of her mind for days at a time. But now?

“I think I saw someone,” she said, regretting bringing it up almost immediately as the shelf of Peña’s brow lowered, intense, severe. But keeping it to herself would not have made it any less true. 

“Where?” he demanded. 

“Outside, across the street,” she said, deciding not to clarify that she also believed she had seen the same man in the grocery store aisle, and at that table outside the café. She still did not trust her perception of those things to any certain degree, and was loath to inspire any kind of warlike defensiveness on Peña’s part unnecessarily.

“Stay here,” he commanded, his hand moving reflexively up to his waist, to his gun, easing it from its holster as he opened and disappeared out the apartment door, slipping down the hall. 

She followed shortly behind him, having to, incapable of standing by inside the apartment, biting her nails, useless, as he stormed out to approach whatever bogeyman lurked on that street. He walked along the sidewalk in a tense crouch, weapon low but poised to be raised as he looked in the windows of almost every car parked along either side of the street, tense, thorough.

“He’s gone,” she told him, stating the obvious as he turned to see her standing there, on the steps. “I don’t know, maybe I imagined it,” she sighed heavily, feeling embarrassed that she had even brought it up. Obviously, his bringing up Alejandro’s jailhouse missives had inspired in her a worsening anxiety, reinvigorating the choking dark billowing she had been beating back, that she had failed to banish. 

He guided her back in the door with a palm at the small of her back, tucking his gun back into its holster as they went inside. If he, too, suspected that she had imagined the whole thing, he didn’t say. Back in the apartment, he informed her with some regret (though very little – she could see an almost eager gleam in his eye, one he could not conceal) that he had to head out, back to work. Apparently the DEA believed, through newly delivered intel, that they had finally ferreted out where one of their prime targets was hiding out, dug down into ground like a fleeing mole. Tonight, they would go there and try to bust him under the cover of dark. 

“Who is it?” she asked him, expecting him to refuse to tell her, needing him to actually do it, to draw the line again, reminding her where they stood in relation to one another, the DEA agent and the cartel woman.

“Ricardo Montaba,” he replied.

There must have been some tell, some change in her expression which told him that this name was not one that was unfamiliar to her. A wince, perhaps, a tightness around the eyes that he picked up on instantly. 

“You’ve met him?” he asked. 

“He likes young women,” she said, not being intentionally cryptic, though she had exactly no interest in explaining to him how the man had pinched her ass at a cocktail party Alejandro held, had asked her, a sour breathed inquiry into the shell of her ear, backing her into a corner, whether she thought Alejandro would be at all amenable to _sharing_ her.

“Well…” Peña said, taking this in, that semi-permanent crease between his brows deepening as he warred with whether to press for more detail, deciding against it, “If we get him tonight, he’s going away for a long time.”

Sometimes she wondered if this really made her feel any better, if it had any measurable effect on her pain at all, to know that these men who had done these things to her and to other, more innocent people would be locked away for years. Part of her thought that anything short of a screaming, hideous death would be too little, would be better than any of them deserved. But she tried not to give that part of herself much volume, knowing that it made her too like them, to want to see their pain, to know how much pleasure it would give her. 

Peña headed off to work, to strap on a flack jacket and suit up for the raid, kissing her cheek as he went, and she put away the groceries, tossing out the meat, which had been out of refrigeration for too long. Instead of making chicken pot pie, she planted herself on the sofa, and spent the entire night on the couch, staring through the slatted window shades, down into the street below.


	23. XXIII

As the first morning light poured in through the slats of the shades, fanning across her face, she rose from her watchpost on the couch and descended on the cleaning supplies under the sink in a spark of insomnia-inspired mania, tying back her hair and grabbing the mop that leaned in the closet, grayish and worn down as she felt. She worked from the ground up, meticulous, motivated by awed disgust at how truly filthy things were, upon close enough inspection. Down on her hands and knees, she scrubbed viciously at mildewed bathroom tile grout, relentlessly buffed soap scum from faucets, emptied out bottles of viscous blue toilet cleaner into a bowl marred by discolored rings.

It was absolutely mindless and back-breaking work and she reveled in it, feeling after a while like her mind itself had been bleached, scrubbed free of every angry inscription, filled with the faux floral choke of Fabuloso. At the hacienda, to achieve the same result, she had gardened, plunging her hands into the soil, crouching in plant beds until her body ached like she was a hundred years old. Here, there was no garden, so she cleaned. She yanked the sheets from their hospital-cornered tuck last, dragging them down the winding staircase into the basement laundry room, kicking open the door and finding the stuffy little room thankfully empty. 

As she was cramming the bedding down into the barrel of the washing machine, though, a young man came in the door at her back, carrying a plastic laundry basket.

“Hey, I just moved in here – do you know how to get a laundry card?” he asked her in Spanish.

“I’m new to the building, too,” she told him, shaking her head, “My card was left out for me with my keys,” she fibbed a little. In truth, Peña had simply handed her both. “The machines take coins, too, though,” she pointed out, gesturing to a machine at the far end of the room, which made change out of small bills.

“Okay, thank you,” he nodded, heading over to it, balancing his basket on his hip and pulling out his wallet. “Hey, are you American?” he asked as he returned to the bank of machines, sidling up beside her, setting down his basket.

“What?” she said, with a hot and cold strike of disbelief. What was this, some kind of code, some question they’d all been instructed to ask her, just so that she’d know that she'd been finally caught?

“Oh, I just asked if you’re American,” he repeated himself.

“Why are you asking me that?” she demanded, striking like a viper, looking past him toward the only exit. One step to the right was all it would take for him to block her in bodily, foil any plan of escape.

“Sorry, your accent, I was just wondering if you were American,” he explained, sheepish, looking put off and a little afraid.

“No,” she snarled back, slamming the washer door, smacking the button to start the cycle.

“Oh, okay,” he replied, quiet, still looking taken aback, dumping his laundry into the barrel of the machine opposite hers. “Hey, I’m sorry if I offended you,” he called out to her as she headed for the door.

She hurried out it without responding, letting it slam at her heels.

Upstairs she locked herself in the apartment, abandoning the sheets, forgetting entirely the bleached-out zen she had earlier achieved, arming herself with a cheap ceramic knife from the kitchen and returning to her post on the couch, staring out the window again, eyes tracking the street for anything remotely out of place. 

Peña came in unexpectedly, though, startling her out of her trancelike voyeurism, the apparently not-so-keen eye she was keeping on neighborhood goings on, given that she’d completely missed him pulling up outside. She whirled around and he saw the knife at the same time she recognized it was just him, and not the guy from the laundry room, come to corner her again. 

“That’s a little frightening,” he pointed out, nodding toward it. 

There was not much she could really say, to respond to or contradict this, since she did not necessarily disagree, so she didn’t bother saying anything, padding into the kitchen to slide the knife back into its block, nonchalant. 

“You alright?” he asked her, suspicion drawing his eyebrows together in a fine wrinkle at the center as he nudged the front door closed at his back. 

“Fine,” she said, an empty assertion. “You?”

“Sure,” he nodded, still wary in appearance, but not pushing it further. 

“What happened with Montaba?” she asked, wanting to change the subject before he changed his mind and sought clarification on the knife. 

He was easy to redirect, sighing and rolling his eyes as he came into the kitchen, setting down bags of groceries on the counter, provisions intended to sustain her for the week. “He wasn’t there.” 

“Bad intel?” she guessed. 

“That, or he was warned,” he shrugged, unclipping his gun holster, setting it down on the counter. He looked at her as she looked at the gun, and she saw, or thought she saw, a renewed spark of that wariness in his eyes, though he quickly looked away, scanning the room. “Where are your sheets?” he asked.

“In the wash,” she said, plopping back down on the couch with a sigh. 

“You left them down there?” he clarified. “I’d sit down there with them until they’re done, if I were you. At least at my place, people love to take things out of the washer and leave them on the floor.” 

“There was some guy down there. It felt weird to stay,” she said, rolling her eyes, speaking of it twice as casually as she felt. But she _already_ felt insane, and would not have felt much better having to explain to him that she had been too _afraid_ to stay downstairs and babysit her laundry.

“He acting suspicious?” Peña asked, playing the detective now, eyes narrowing. 

“No,” she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she followed up with. Realistically, she knew that if anyone was acting suspicious, it was _her_. And yet…

“You sure you’re alright?” Peña asked, watching her carefully, scanning her face, trying to decode what he read there. “You look…tired,” he said, the descriptor he finally decided on, a milder one than he’d obviously intended. 

“No,” she finally admitted, shaking her head, turning away from him, turning her face into the couch cushions. “I’m not alright. I’m fucking losing it,” she told him, harsh. She turned her head slightly, peeked at him with the one uncovered eye, trying to read him. How fed up with her, exactly, was he? What would his reaction be to what came next, inevitable as a sneeze? “I can’t stay here,” she said, voice painfully small, muffled by the cushion. 

“What?” he said. She wasn’t sure whether he genuinely couldn’t hear her, or if it was more of an expression of disbelief. He came closer, to crouch beside her as she groaned, frustrated. 

She picked her head up, faced him more squarely, and repeated herself. “I can’t stay here. I’m sorry, I can’t fucking do it. It’s too fucking _sterile_ …too fucking _quiet_. Every fucking sound is him sending someone after me. The nights you come over, I feel fine, but the nights you don’t, when I’m here alone at night? I can’t, I just can’t. I don’t sleep. I just lay there, frozen, waiting to die. And then I do psychotic shit like yelling at someone who’s asking me about laundry,” she shook her head, as if to banish the thought, to erase it from her mind like an etch-e-sketch. “Javi…can’t I just…stay with you?” she was back at it again, fastening on strings, giving them a coaxing little tug. Saying his name in that sweet little voice, making him think, she was betting, of that same voice, soft in his ear, while he was inside of her. 

He looked utterly taken aback, eyes sliding out of focus as the cogs in his mind turned. He stood, from his squat beside the couch, to pace away.

She hauled herself to her feet, trailing after him into the kitchen. “I can clean,” she volunteered, “I can’t really cook, but I’m sure I could learn. And you can still bring home hookers. Just give me some notice and I’ll go for a walk around the block.” 

This last offer stopped him in his tracks, in his cagey pacing, back and forth across the linoleum. He was scowling, not particularly amused, hands planted testily on his hips. 

“Look, I know the score, okay?” she said. “I’m not expecting you to marry me, or be my boyfriend, or anything psychotic like that. I just think…this could be a mutually beneficial arrangement; you know?”

“I’m not taking you in as a maid or a god damn chef,” he told her, pointing an annoyed finger in her direction, “You can come stay with me until we figure out what the hell you’re going to do next. You do not owe me sex or anything else in exchange. And I appreciate the offer, but I’m not going to be bringing home any hookers. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”


	24. XXIV

She insisted on taking the couch, watched him arrange it, sitting by, impassive, as he tucked in sheets, fluffed the pillow at one end. It was a necessary illusion for the both of them, though maybe more so him, since he’d gotten so bent out of shape at the implication that she’d be trading sex for lodging. She was _just_ a guest, nothing more…

Ultimately, though, when the lights were out, when she heard him settle down into his bed with a sigh, she crept into his room, crawled into bed beside him. The sigh against her ear as he pulled her in flush, tucking her body in close, was equal parts contentment and aggravation. She pulled his arm in around her waist tighter, suffocatingly close. 

He was hard when she woke, her rump tucked down into his lap as he curled in around her, his palm sleepily cupping a handful of her tit he’d grabbed in sleep, thumb strumming unconsciously over her nipple. She was only half awake but she _wanted_ , her body hot and tingling all over, hips grinding back against him. His breath was warm against the back of her neck, halting and then sighing as he woke, too, both palms sliding up under her arms from behind to pull her in closer, cupping her breasts, warm, kneading, thumbs stroking over her nipples as they peaked against the fabric of her t-shirt, hardening.

“Morning,” he murmured, voice gritty with sleep, against her ear. 

She gasped at the lightning bolt of sensation as his fingers pinched down around her nipples, hard. Slid her hand down the plane of her belly, into the front of her own boxers, fingers dipping between her legs, sliding along the seam of her sex. She was fucking wet _already_ , hot, slicking her fingers, drawing it up over her clit as he ground his hips against her, kissing her neck. Thought maybe she’d make herself come, just like this, held close in his arms. But he pried her hand free of her boxers before long, taking her fingertips into his mouth, licking them clean. This wasn’t new. _She was never allowed to…_

Her mind leapt away from that thought, like a hand touched to the burner of a stove.

He reached down to peel her bottoms off, sliding them just down to her knees, just enough. Twisted to reach into his bedside drawer, pull out a condom, roll it on. Touching her from behind, fingers stroking at her entrance, gathering wetness, reaching down his own boxers to slick it over the head of his erection. His breath faltered at her ear as he freed himself from his boxers, taking his cock in hand, sliding it up against her entrance and pushing sharply into her with no further preamble, driving deep, spreading her wide with one firm push. It was so much tighter this way, as she lay on her side, her rump tucked in tight against his hips as he fucked into her deeper, groaning. She was awake now, for certain, a wounded noise startled free of her at the stretch, the _burn_. Fuck, it was _worse_ this time. 

“I know, I know,” he whispered, hot, against her ear as she whined helplessly, testily, his arm sliding low around her waist to tug her in closer, the head of his cock butting up against her cervix. “Take it like a big girl, honey. You’re okay.” 

The condescension in his voice was as fucking sick as it was delicious, had her panting, willing to endure the stinging, the stretch, as he pulled back and then drove back into her, slow and deliberate and deep. Her clit was throbbing, swollen and achy with arousal. His big warm hands slid up under her t-shirt, cupping her tits, squeezing hard, fingers plucking at and pinching her nipples until her hands came up to still his. 

“Oh my god, _move_ , Peña,” she said, a gasping instruction. He was just _sitting_ there; driven so far up inside her she could practically feel him in her stomach. 

“Easy,” he shushed her, reaching down to feel where they were joined, to slide fingertips over where she was stretched so wide around him, almost raw. “Fuck, you can’t really take me like this, can you, querida?” he groaned as he touched her clit and she flexed around him. 

“Yes, I can,” she insisted, and it sounded whiny even to her own ears, uncertain. 

“You probably need a finger or two first, don’t you?” he said, like her body was some kind of mathematical equation he was trying to solve. Meanwhile, he wasn’t moving, just leaving her _skewered_ , pinned in place. “Sorry, baby. You were just so _wet_.” 

“Shut up and fuck me,” she demanded, not kindly, her teeth gritted. She didn’t want him to _discuss_ her. She wanted him to hold her down and pound every fucking thought out of her brain. 

He chuckled, told her to relax, all the while drawing back, free of her, her body clinging to his, trying to hold onto him, hold him inside. Just to piss her off, she was sure, to get her even more worked up, he pulled back to the point that the tip of him almost spilled out, almost was squeezed out by the unconscious clenching of her muscles. But it wasn’t, and he filled her back up just the same as he’d emptied her out, just as slowly. 

As he opened her up around him, his hips churned against her ass in slow revolutions, drawing out every thrust to really let her feel it, feel all of him, boring his way into her. She squirmed, but not enough to free herself, not sure if she wanted to. Her orgasm built like something ruinous in her gut, coiling tighter and tighter with each deep grinding thrust, building and building with nowhere to go, never topping out. He was hitting a spot at the very end of her, right up _under_ her cervix, that made her vision white out, a sensation like someone was yanking a string behind her bellybutton, _hard_. 

But he wasn’t _fucking_ her, wasn’t pounding his body into hers, forcing her body to give, to accept his. So she wasn’t going to come. It wasn’t in her programming. She wanted to elbow him off of her, roll over and go back to sleep, surly, disappointed, denied, but there was no chance of that now. She’d simply have to let _him_ finish. 

But his voice was _filthy_ in her ear, a low whisper, telling her how fucking wet she was, how tight, how good she felt around his cock, and then all of a sudden an orgasm was torn out of her without warning, and she was shuddering so fucking hard around him, coming so hard it felt like her lungs had collapsed. And she was making a sound that she didn’t even recognize, once she drew enough breath to do so, feeling his smile on her skin as he kissed her neck.

“Fuck,” she cried out, disoriented, drunk with it, vision fuzzy. He was still hard, still thrusting up inside her, his tempo uninterrupted, and that seemed impossible to her, that her world had just ended and it had not pulled him into its orbit, taken him with her. And then she came around him _again_ , in ripples that cramped up her entire abdomen, tearing through her like shockwaves, ebbing and then cresting over and over again, unrelenting, as he continued to drive up inside of her, gentle but unceasing.

“Oh my god, Peña, I can’t,” she choked out, her breath stuttering, uneven. 

“Say my name, baby,” he insisted, coaxing, sucking a hickey into her neck. She could’ve fucking smacked him for marking her like that, wanted to, but couldn’t feel her arms, save for a vague tingle. 

“ _Javi_ , please,” she begged, her voice exhausted, hoarse as she continued to come around him, clenching like a fist, waves of smaller climaxes that crested over and over, never ebbing. “Just come.”

It was as if he read the direction of her thoughts, or maybe she was just moving _that slowly_ , so that when she went to roll over, away from him, he rolled with her, over her, his entire body coming to rest over the top of hers, driving her down into the mattress, his hips, his cock, his chest pressing down against her back, pressing all the air out of her. 

She hadn’t the leverage at that point to do more than lay there beneath him and _feel_ – feel her body still straining to accommodate his, feel the weight of him, pressing her down into the bed, feel the warmth of his hand against the back of her neck. It was a car bomb blast of pure sensation, right up her spine. A burn, a pressure, a slide. Fuck, she was _obsessed_ with this _feeling_. 

He was deadly silent, thrusting down into her, filling her body up with his like she was some cracked vase, overfilled, spilling over. He was so heavy, his weight over her grounding, subduing her. Her fingers dug down into the covers, seeking purchase. A low sound rolled from her throat, unbidden. He reached down to smooth the hair out of her face, away from her flushed cheek, kissing her, whispering sweetly about how fucking well she was taking it. 

She came for him _again_ , hard, kept coming, shuddering hard beneath him. And it seemed that this was the final, necessary thing to set him over, to make him jerk himself free of her, yank the condom off, spilling his load with a series throaty, loud groans, all over her ass, over the raw, fucked-open lips of her cunt. 

“Fuck, this is _not_ going to make it easy to go to work,” he sighed heavily, stroking her flank, just staring down at the mess he’d made of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🙏 amen


	25. XXV

“I asked Connie, Murphy’s wife, to come check in on you when she comes back from her shift at the hospital, so when someone knocks on the door, don’t freak out,” Peña informed Sarah, setting a mug of coffee down in front of her, his own already at his lips. 

She cringed, curling her upper lip around the rim of the mug. It was so awkward that he’d had to ask someone to come check on her, a grown woman. Someone who was a _nurse_ , coming home from a no doubt grueling shift. Since when had Sarah become this _pathetic_ , she wondered? Had it been a gradual winnowing of strength, or a more dramatic decline, an armor thrown down defeat?

“I’m just trying to keep that knife out of your hand, alright, baby? It’s no big deal,” he insisted, having read the trepidation in her expression, even clear across the room, while trying to fight his way into a button-up and eat a point of toast at the same time. “She’s really just coming to introduce herself. They live right upstairs – it’ll be nice for you to have someone to call who’s nearby.” 

She had the faintest hope that this was the way Murphy had presented the idea to his wife, asking her to drop by and introduce herself to Peña’s new… _roommate_ after work, but knew this could not be the case, not if they were a real married couple, trading close confidences and judgments. Sarah hated to think of what Connie was already thinking of her, what Steve had told his wife of her, from the little he’d gotten to know. 

“I should be home around six, but I’ll call you when I’m on my way,” he said, leaning down to kiss her cheek before picking up his keys and heading out the door. 

There was a breath of relief, almost, as the door closed behind him – a tension she hadn’t realized her body had been holding. There was a certain amount of pressure, in his presence, to behave a certain way; an anxiety and an awareness of her audience, an urge to perform a role. He liked her wounded, so she was sad, doe-eyed, shoulders curled inward. It had been much the same with Nick – he saw himself as a savior, and it was her job to convince him of that, to play the counterpart. 

Alejandro, conversely, had liked her fire-eyed, feral; wanted the satisfaction of taming something wild, bending it to his will. And that version of her was still there too; it simply simmered beneath the surface. 

Women were much more difficult to appease, to predict. Sarah didn’t know what Connie had been told about her, how the woman expected her to be, what assumptions she’d made that Sarah would need to contradict. Sarah spent a fair amount of time before the mirror, finger-combing her hair, trying on various “unassuming, friendly” type expressions before she came, but ultimately, it was hopeless. She looked like what she was, which was scared. 

She also looked disheveled – even taking Peña’s comb to the rat’s nest of her hair, slicking it back into a low bun, had not helped this, not when she had swollen, bitten lips, her whole mouth pink from the burn of his facial hair around them. This was not even mentioning the hickey he’d given her, blue red and profane, sucked into the juncture of her neck and shoulder. This, at least, she could hide beneath the collar of her shirt. 

The anticipation of that knock on the door was the only thing that could occupy her, keeping her in its thrall until it finally came. She sat on the couch, waiting, arms curled around her knees, staring down the hall at the front door like it would come alive, with a yawning maw to admit the woman. Even so, Sarah was not prepared when she heard it, the succinct rap of knuckles against the wood, leaping from the couch as though it had burned her, staring wildly around, wondering if there was anything she should’ve cleaned or prepared, like a tray of beverages or fresh baked cookies. 

“Hi, I’m Connie Murphy, Steve’s wife.” She was smiling – not hugely, not falsely; close-lipped, but endearing. Eyes blue, bright. She was blonde, hair pulled back into a smooth, low ponytail, with pieces pulled or fallen free to frame her face. Her face was the incongruency – where her smile was open, warm, the rest of her face was closed off, trepidatious. 

“Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Sarah,” she returned, trying to smile just as easily, deciding not to specify her own affiliation to Peña, recognizing that it was assumed. She wondered whether she should invite Connie in, warred with the idea for a moment, considering that Connie might perceive it to be rude if Sarah didn’t at least offer, but might also have no interest in spending more than a few moments introducing herself, as she’d promised she would, freeing herself of the obligation and returning to her own life, her own plans for the day. 

“I just wanted to come by and introduce myself,” Connie said, “Steve and I are up on the second floor – 205. My schedule at the hospital is a little hectic, but I wanted to give you my number, let you know that we’re both around, if you ever need anything,” she passed Sarah a slip of paper, upon which she’d written both her cell phone number and the number of their landline. 

“Thank you,” Sarah said, bones aching with the discomfort of it all. Connie didn’t want to be her friend any more than Sarah wanted her to feel obligated to. Why men felt the need to meddle in the affairs of women, she’d never know. 

“Look, I know you probably won’t call,” Connie said, surprising her, a complete tonal change, something entirely more honest, “But I just wanted to say, you can, you know. Even if you just want to talk. Even if it’s about nothing,” she looked at Sarah now with genuine warmth, with sympathy, adding, “I don’t have many friends here, either. So it would be nice for me, too.”

“Okay, thanks,” Sarah nodded, Connie’s number folded up in her fist, burning there. She still wouldn’t call. She thought Connie must’ve known that, because she gave Sarah a sort of pitying look, then, one that communicated that of course she’d known that Sarah wouldn’t buy it, the notion that she was the one doing _Connie_ a favor by reaching out. Connie saw her as Sarah had known she would – as someone in freefall, grasping at branches on the way down. Sarah knew by looking at her that Connie would offer herself as such a branch, if Sarah were to reach out for it – not because she wanted to, particularly, but because it was who she was, elementally. The kind of person who gave from her own cup until it was empty. And Sarah couldn’t really identify with that. 

Sarah closed the door on Connie’s tepid wave, on the creases of concern in her forehead, and on her in general.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maddiegrahaml, you called this one!
> 
> Also wanted to say thank you to you and Alberta_Sunrise - I look forward to y'all's comments with every chapter I post, so thanks for hanging in there and still reading. 
> 
> And thanks to everyone else who has left a comment. So glad y'all are enjoying.


	26. XXVI

“I need more books,” she told Peña, closing a weighty tome on Ancient Rome in her lap, setting it aside on the coffee table. It was after dinner and he was having his nightly scotch, reviewing case files on the couch, a routine she had insinuated herself into easily, her feet in his lap as she read the volumes he picked up for her from the local library, kneading at his thigh absentmindedly, or purposely, as the case may be, until he put a hand over her feet to still them, shoved them aside, if he was cross, or set the files aside to face her, mood depending. She was a particular fan of the last response. 

“Make a list. I can stop by this weekend,” he replied, still entirely embroiled in what he was reading, not easily diverted. 

“Or I could just go,” she shrugged. 

He offered no response or reaction – brow furrowed as he read, lips, beneath the fringe of his mustache, mouthing some of the words. 

“It would save you a trip,” she pressed, staring at him, hard, willing him to acknowledge her, “And it would be something for me to do.” This was the real motivation – something to do, something to entertain her, to free her from the unceasing monotony that had become her day to day life. 

Moving in with Peña had been like finally being able to take a full breath – a sureness, a safety in his presence. But absent the constant threat, constant fear, a space had opened up for contemplation, for reflection upon her life, upon her personhood. And she had found all of it lacking. 

“It’s not safe,” he said simply, a practically rehearsed line, one he offered so automatically that he did not even bother to stop reading, to look over at her, to say it. 

Something about the fact that it had become such an automated response, that he delivered it now without any hint of remorse, without the eyes pooling with sympathy and understanding, that he had once turned to her as he said it, provoked in her a hot, instant rage that sent her storming out of the living room, into the bathroom where she got ready for bed shaking with hatred, scrubbing viciously at her teeth until her gums bled, scrubbing at her face until it was raw. She slammed the bedroom door behind her, though he had not followed her and seemed to have no object to, turning down the bed so furiously it was a wonder she didn’t rip the sheets. 

Peña came in maybe an hour later, showered, smelling of palo santo and mouthwash, climbing in under the covers with a heavy sigh. She wondered whether he’d been so delayed purposely, strategically, to allow her rage to exhaust itself, burn out, before he came to bed, or if her theatrical exit had simply failed to move him in the slightest, such that he continued reading, unbothered, until he was ready for bed. The second possibility, and its likelihood, made her jaw tight with anger, her spine curved away from him, rigid with hate, as she teetered on the very furthest edge of the mattress. 

“Sarah,” he breathed her name, soft, low, reaching out run his palm along the curve of her arm. 

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she insisted, jerking as far from his reach as she could without toppling over the edge of the bed, onto the floor. 

He sighed heavily again, scooping an arm in under her waist, using it to tow her in, folding her into his chest like a stuffed animal and not the very angry person that she was, spitting mad like a trodden-on viper. Her flailing arms, her hands that pried at his, insisting that he let her go, he folded in against her chest, trapping them there, squeezing tight, shushing her softly, warm against her ear, as she continued to curse him. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured against her ear, breath warm, ducking his head to kiss her neck, soft. The apology was so general, so unelaborated as to be made absolutely empty – he was sorry _for_ her, but not _about_ anything he’d done. It only made her feel worse, more impotent, like she could claw him to shreds if she wanted, but it wouldn’t change a thing. 

And perhaps worst of all was that she _wanted_ to be comforted, even if it was by him – no, _particularly_ by him, so much that she twisted all the way around in his arms, practically pulling her wrists from socket, and buried her face against his chest. Fucking Christ, she was _crying_. _Why_ was she always crying? It was her practical instant reaction to a myriad of inconveniences these days, and it _sickened_ her. She didn’t know who she was, but she was not _this_ person. 

“I’m going fucking stir-crazy,” she wept, nonetheless, into the crook of Peña’s shoulder, “You can’t just lock me in this apartment, you fucking psycho. That wasn’t the deal.” She insisted on this, yet there remained a looming uncertainty, a question: _was it _? Perhaps she’d jumped out of one fire and into another.__

__“I’m just trying to keep you safe, sweetheart,” he sighed, a gust which stirred the hair at her crown. “If he has them out looking for you…”_ _

__“I’d rather be fucking dead than be trapped here for the rest of my god damn life,” she insisted forcefully, squirming back slightly to glare up at him in the dark, wanting, more than anything at that moment, to bite him, to sink teeth directly into him._ _

__“That’s a little over the top, wouldn’t you say?” he chuckled softly, clearly trying to stifle it and failing. He was quite correct in thinking that it would only infuriate her further, to be laughed at._ _

__Of course she wouldn’t _actually_ prefer death to this purgatory – had she, she could’ve offed herself any day of the fucking week. But neither could she be happy here, like this, trapped in an endless cycle of the same _nothing_. He wasn’t really responsible for her happiness, though, was he? She’d only _made_ him, as he’d stated, responsible for her safety, her continued existence. _ _

__“Javi,” she breathed out a dejected little sigh, nuzzling back in close, pressing as much of her body in against his as she could, her breasts flattening against his bare chest through her t-shirt, belly expanding against him with every breath._ _

__He reached down to palm her rump, tugging her in closer still. “How about you come to the library with me?” he offered, warm hands smoothing up the dip in her waist, up under her t-shirt. “Would you like that?” he asked, hands gravitating higher, like he was feeling out the hot and cold of her._ _

__“Yeah,” she nodded, reaching down to curl her fingers around him through his boxers. Because she could. Because it was the expected outcome. Because it was her card to play._ _

__“Yeah?” his mouth stayed open, a pout of awakened lust, reaching up, thumb tracing an exploratory circle around her nipple through the shirt._ _

__“Yeah,” she confirmed, leaning in to lick into his mouth, sloppy, teasing. What she meant was yes for now. Yes, until she wanted more. Yes, until it wasn’t enough._ _


	27. XXVII

For the sixth time in half as many hours, she peered between the slats of the living room blinds, down into the street, which glistened, obsidian in the dark, reflecting back the pearlescent light of the moon. She had vowed to give up the agoraphobic, window-watching woman bit the day Peña had opened his door to her. And yet, here she found herself. 

Peña was late. Or maybe _he_ was not late, given that he’d promised no particular hour of return, but the hour itself grew late, the midnight hours stretching out endlessly, unspooling in silence, well past 2 AM with no sign of him. 

She was wide awake, teetering on the edge of _something_ , holding her breath for some sign of his car on the street below, the flash of his headlights as he pulled into the parking garage below the building. Her stomach was in knots, a rat king’s mass of wormy, intertwined tails, writhing in her guts, nightmarish scenarios flashing through her mind.

In every impossible imagining, it was Alejandro’s finger on the trigger, his wolfish eyes that flashed with triumph and sick pleasure as Peña’s last breath left his lips. 

She took a hot shower, a bid to self-soothe, and sat on the shower floor for a long time, knees tucked to her chest, letting the water rain down over the crown of her head, into her eyes, thinking, for whatever reason, of how as a child, her mother had sometimes turned on the shower overhead when giving her a bath, flickering the lights as if they were in the midst of a thunderhead together, telling her that they were in the rainforest. She remembered how delighted she’d been by it all, feeling practically amphibian, imagining herself a poison dart frog on a leaf. It wasn't long, though, before that memory grew tiger's teeth, sank into her; before she was forced to banish it from her mind.

She did feel better, somewhat, when she emerged from the shower, practically boiled, crustacean, steam rising from the pink of her skin. She cinched her robe around her waist and was returning to her post in the living room just as Peña came in the front door.

He was dirty, clothes and face marred with some kind of dry, dusty soil, and he was sweat-drenched, shirt soaked through in places, hair saturated and plastered to his forehead in slashes at his temples. He looked worse than she had ever seen him, like he had been dragged through a knothole backwards.

“Are you okay?” she asked him immediately, because his being there seemed to suggest that he _was_ , while his appearance itself tended to suggest the opposite. 

“I’m fine,” he insisted, sighing heavily, locking the door at his back, sliding the deadbolt home. 

He angled around her as she drew in close to inspect him in the harsher light of the kitchen, proceeding deeper into the room to unstrap his holster and lay it aside. He was moving peculiarly, gingerly, holding himself painstakingly upright. 

“Are you hurt?” she demanded, scrutinizing him, eyes narrowed into a disbelieving shape. 

“No, I…the guy ran and we had to chase him,” he elaborated, finally, with a tightness in his expression, around his eyes, that had as much to do with discomfort as it did with hesitation to share, to worry her, “I ended up jumping off of a balcony to keep up with him, and I think I bruised a few ribs. Didn’t even catch the fucking guy, which is just great.”

“Jesus, Peña,” she exclaimed, following him into the kitchen, where he was grabbing a beer from the fridge. “Let me see,” she insisted, reaching in to untuck the right side of his shirt with a yank, pulling it up to see the sprawling, purpling bruise that crawled its way up the side of his ribs, all the way down below the line of his belt, where she could no longer see it. “Fuck, this looks like it hurts,” she hissed, a sympathetic sound, “We need to put arnica on this. Do you have any?” she reached up, unthinking, to draw her fingertips over his ribcage, the lightest brush, as though she could feel the bloom of hurt beneath his skin that way, detect the severity, a pulsing tactility against her fingers. 

He jerked immediately away from her touch with a sharp intake of breath.

“You’re hurt!” she accused. People who were _fine_ did not recoil like kicked animals, she knew. 

“Your hands are cold,” he argued, though careful to put himself out of her reach, lest she try it again. 

“Javi!” she complained, worry drawing her eyebrows down together in the center. He couldn’t be _hurt_. He was not supposed to get hurt. She had no clue what to do with his hurt, how to repair it, how to put him back together. 

“Amor,” he told her, seriously, setting down his beer to take her face in his hands, “I promise you, I’m okay.”

She glared up at him, unconvinced, but eventually said, “Fine.”

“You were worried about me, huh?” he asked her, leaning back against the counters to sip his beer, a sly little grin on his lips. 

“It’s almost four in the morning,” she complained, shooting him a harsh, unamused look. “You left here at seven. I thought you were fucking dead.” Dead. With every hour that had passed, she’d grown more and more certain of it, that Peña was dead, that he would never return to her, that this road, too, had come to its abrupt, inevitable end. 

“So you were worried about me,” he repeated, insistent, grinning. 

“Of course I was fucking worried. Does everyone I...know have to die?” she retorted, stumbling over the particular choice of wording. What _had_ she been about to say, she wondered? Everyone she _cares_ about? _Needs_? As she looked across at him, she could sense that he wondered the same, but neither of them remarked on it aloud. 

“I’m not going to die, querida,” he assured her, stepping in close again to cup her chin in his hand. She could’ve cursed him for making such a promise, one that was entirely out of his hands to keep, but he ducked his head then to kiss her, hard, the clash of their mouths like a rock slide, slanted and fervent, wrapping her up in his arms, towing her in close, up onto her tip toes, in against his chest. 

She wanted to be closer, as close as she could possibly get, wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing her body in a tight line against his. He groaned, a soft huff of what could’ve been arousal, could’ve been pain, the bruised-up stretch of him molding itself to fit the shape of her as he kissed her like he was drinking from a stream, tongue dipping into the well of her mouth. 

He tired of stooping before long and curled his arm in tighter around her waist to lift her, up onto the edge of the counter to sit, her knees caging in his waist, squeezing there, urging him on. There was a definite groan of discomfort, then, but he only kissed her harder, reaching down to wrap her legs around his waist tighter, her ankles crossing at the small of his back. Her tongue was in his mouth, then, feeling the slick strangeness of his tongue against it. 

Her robe had parted between her thighs as she wrapped her legs around him, as he pressed in even closer, and the angle was _just right_ , such that the seam of his zipper, that pronounced, denim ridge, made even more pronounced by the strain of his erection behind it, split the seam of her sex. 

It was almost _wrong_ , almost uncomfortable, the grind and drag of the rough fabric of his jeans against the delicate flesh of her sex. But as she tilted her hips forward, ground unconsciously up against him, still feeding at his mouth like he was her only sustenance in the entire world, there was an edge to it that was exactly _right_. 

Her clit engorged with the friction and arousal and she realized then that she could come, just from this, grinding against the zipper of his jeans. He was not dumb, or made of stone, so she was certain that he noticed this, her making use of his body in this way, taking her own pleasure. There was something about the fact that he said nothing, didn’t acknowledge it all, her getting herself off, that was almost more satisfying than if his voice had been in her ear, husky and low, urging her on. 

She interrupted the kiss to breathe, almost gasping for it, and he bowed his head to kiss her shoulder, nudging the collar of her robe aside, his lips sliding up into the juncture of her neck, kissing openmouthed, sucking at the delicate patch of skin just beneath her ear.

She was so fucking keyed up, so wet, her slickness smearing over the fly of his jeans, which had chafed her almost raw and _yet_ had her teetering on the razor’s edge of an orgasm, panting, head thrown back against the cabinets, all decorum and pretense and the charade of pretending she wasn’t about to get herself off, dry, by humping him like some kind of _animal_ , totally forgotten.

A moan wrenched its way out of her in a near-sob as she came, hunching against him, clinging to him, arms around his neck, like he was the only anchor in miles and miles of sea. He held her fast, told her, “You’re so fucking beautiful,” hands cupping her face, peppering it with kisses, reverent. 

And she cursed herself, then, because _how_ could she have let herself want something so badly that she could never really have, would never truly deserve?


	28. XXVIII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've added a few new tags, so refamiliarize yourself with them just in case. Also, always feel free to suggest a tag if you think there's something I've missed.

“Hey, you want to open the wine?” Peña requested, handing her both the bottle and the corkscrew as he turned back to the pot of rice on the stove, fluffing it with a fork, the sound of it like a chicken’s scratch against stone. “Steve just called – said he and Connie will be down in a few minutes.”

Removing a cork from a bottle of wine – how was it that Sarah had never done something so basic, so banal, in all of her life? She twisted the screw down into the cork, gave it an almighty yank, and practically dropped the bottle when half of the cork came free, leaving the bottle still stoppered. “I think I fucked it up,” she told Peña, remorseful, sidling in to take his place, to ensure the chicken didn’t burn as he, chuckling good-naturedly, took the bottle back, coaxing the cork free without particular hardship. 

“Don’t be nervous,” he told her, as though he could taste it in the air, the slightly acrid tang of her anxiety, bitter and unpleasant, “This is supposed to be fun.”

She could see that; that he’d intended for this to be quite the lighthearted evening, a casual dinner like he’d probably had with Steve and Connie a hundred times over since they’d been assigned as partners. But for Sarah it was never so easy to feel at ease, regardless of all the assurances. There remained a constant pressure to be charming, to be liked, to win Peña’s people over with every move, every word. To subvert all suspicion and narrow-eyed concern with some magic formula of smiling enough, laughing easily enough, looking interested enough at every anecdote. A formula she could never find, an impossible computation. 

As Peña ushered Steve and Connie in over the threshold, offering them glasses of wine, Sarah posed by the stove – smiling, but not too much; open, but nonthreatening – pantomiming the role of the domestic goddess, prodding at the chicken which Peña had prepared entirely on his own. Perhaps they thought that this was what Peña _needed_ – someone to take care of him. So it would be best, she thought, not to let on that in their relationship, such that it was, things were conducted quite oppositely. 

They sat down together before long to eat, tucking into fragrant plates of saffron rice and a chicken with a creamy, turmeric-based sauce, and Connie and Sarah found themselves pushed together again in conversation, much the way groups of parents would sometimes force their differently-aged children to go off and play with one another at parties, like it or not, seeking a little respite; uninterrupted time amongst their own kind of people. 

This is what Steve and Peña seemed to be after, as though they didn’t already spend all of their waking daytime hours in one another’s company. It was interesting to watch, at least, the ease of their interaction, the way they bantered across the table, discussing work. Such a _normal_ concept, to become so close with the people you worked with, especially when you were so often in the trenches together, under the wire. 

But even as he and Peña discussed the logistics of an indictment they were seeking, fully embroiled in discussion, Sarah caught Steve’s eye across the table more than once, an expression in the swirling, oceanic blue of his irises like he was a boy peering at an animal in a cage, a zoo exhibit or some kind of circus oddity, curious and put off in turns. He was apparently not at all adjusted to the idea that he was expected to pretend that this was all normal, that there was nothing out of place or strange about Peña’s apparent determination to keep her as a pet. 

“You know, I have a day off this Saturday, and I was thinking maybe you and I could go and get our nails done together, Sarah. Maybe even do a little shopping,” Connie offered in a lull in the mealtime conversation, smiling encouragingly, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real girls’ day.” 

“I think Sarah would really enjoy that, right?” Peña turned to her, beaming encouragingly, apparently overjoyed at the suggestion, which was, in its own way, kind of sweet. 

“Sure, that would be great,” Sarah agreed. Beneath the surface, in a feeling that stretched in her chest like hot tar, dripping stickily across her ribs, she was annoyed with Peña for speaking for her. How could he profess to know what she’d _enjoy_? Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t enjoy a “girls’ day.” What the hell did he know? And if she _hadn’t_ wanted to go, if she’d intended to politely demur, she certainly couldn’t do so after he’d so enthusiastically declared her interest. 

Ultimately, she knew he was probably only thrilled at the prospect of her having something to do besides sit at home and resent her inability to roam freely. Knew he had simply expressed himself openly, reflexively, the way normal people did. But the fact remained, even so, that his speaking for her reminded her too much of someone else, someone who used to pinch her thigh under the table at dinner parties such as these, hard, cautioning her diplomacy, discretion, on the rare occasions she was spoken to directly. 

The evening drew to a quiet close, left just Peña and Sarah together in the low light of the kitchen, cleaning up after the meal. She couldn’t help but notice it, how they worked together in near-perfect synchrony, in companionable silence, handing dishes across without a word, revolving around one another like planets in the tiny galaxy of the kitchen. 

It struck her then, a feeling like she didn’t know how they’d gotten there, to such a place – like walking into a room and forgetting what you’d wandered in there for in the first place, standing around idling, waiting for inspiration. It was almost eerily domestic, the picture they made, just _existing_ together in that apartment. Part of her felt…unsettled by that notion. Like she’d gone to all of this trouble, through hell and high waters, to be freed, a caught sea turtle in a net, only to become entangled again, like there was something she _needed_ about it, something she couldn’t resist. And she really couldn’t bear it, having to _need_ another person. 

But another part of her felt a kind of comfort with him, an ease, that she was enraptured with, though a stranger to. There was something so good about him, so right about _them_ , a truth beyond anything she could rationalize. Had she wanted to, she could have satisfied herself with this, let that lemon yellow ease ensconce her, chase all the doubt from her mind. But of course she could not.

And with such a war in her mind, what could she do but externalize it? 

“Were you afraid I was going to say no, when Connie invited me out?” she asked him, a manufactured lightness in her tone she could not feel on the inside. She knew she was being passive aggressive, but couldn’t stop it. 

“Hm? No, why?” he inquired, with bewildered, soft eyes; puppy eyes; _how_ could you be mad at _me_ eyes. 

“It just seemed like you jumped in pretty quickly to answer for me,” she shrugged. She could feel that she was picking a fight unnecessarily, that it had not been an interaction that bore dissecting to this level of minutia, but she could not stop herself. It was like trying to stop running your tongue across a scratch on the roof of your mouth, a near-impossible kind of self-restraint.

“I didn’t answer for you,” he disagreed with this assessment, brows knit together, dubious, as he finished scraping out the pot of rice into a Tupperware before handing the dirtied pot across to be soaked, “I just said you’d enjoy it.” 

“How do you _know_ if I’d enjoy it?” she pressed, testy. “What if I have a phobia of people touching my nails? What if I had other plans? What if I don’t even like Connie?”

“Why don’t you like her?” he asked, choosing this portion of the explanation, of course, to respond to – the portion least in need of belaboring. 

“I _do_ like her,” she insisted, exasperated.

“Then I don’t see the problem,” he shrugged. She could tell that he genuinely didn’t understand, but she couldn’t help being frustrated by this, that he had not had the common sense to become a mind-reader in the time they’d spent together. Being with her seemed to demand it, did it not, this kind of divination, for all the things she could not and would not say? So how could he dare to fall short?

“Forget it,” she snapped, dropping the pan she had been scrubbing clean down into the soapy dishwater, hard. It splashed up around her wrists, a dramatic punctuation. 

“Come on, querida,” he coaxed, sidling up behind her at the sink, arms curling in around her waist, encircling her in a quieting, conciliatory warmth. “I’m sorry,” he leaned down to kiss right beneath her ear, “I’ll never do it again,” he vowed, with a mocking earnestness. 

“Fuck off,” she sighed, unamused, though she shrugged her shoulders back, anyway, giving him more real estate to work with as he kissed his way along the column of her neck, into the hollow of her clavicle, where his tongue flicked out to trace along the jumping point of her pulse, his saliva cooling on her skin like a wet brand. 

He was flush against her now, pressing her up against the edge of the sink – she could feel him, so hard, through his jeans, pressed right up against her ass as she tilted her hips back. This was something, wasn’t it, something that could maybe be enough, that his body responded this way to hers, and hers to his? Perhaps they needed no greater rationalization. 

He smoothed his hands all along her body, up under the gauzy fabric of her dress, rucking it up as his hands moved up her thighs, across her belly, fingers stroking along her ribs. She closed her eyes, still up to her forearms in suds, as his palms slid up to grip her breasts, hard, her nipples tightening against his palms. His hands were everywhere, all at once, overwhelming, like he was mapping out every square inch of her in his mind, memorizing her. Maybe _this_ was the same as being known. 

“Stay right there,” he murmured softly, pulling away, a bit, one hand still planted at her waist, ensuring her compliance. 

He knelt down behind her then, pushing her farther forward over the sink, reaching up under her dress to pull her panties down around her knees. Then his fingers and his face were between her thighs, and he was spreading her apart with his thumbs, licking into her cunt, a flat, broad stroke of his tongue. 

Mere moments of this particularly focused attention had her beside herself, sagging against the edge of the sink in a practical swoon, the counter’s edge digging hard into her midsection, the only thing holding her aloft as her knees bowed and refused to hold her. He licked into her cunt warm, wet, and invasive, his tongue pointed, just scarcely teasing at the hood of her clit, and she sighed out a breath like she could die there, just like that, with that beautiful face of his framed between her thighs.

He held her thighs apart as they trembled, as they threatened to close, fastening his lips delicately over her clit, the back of his tongue stroking across the throbbing bud of it, her breath rising in staccato gasps, pulse hammering in her throat and heat rising in her cheeks. As he lapped at her clit, everything wound even tighter, her teeth gritted so tight her jaw ached.

She was sweating, and disheveled, and almost unhinged, every muscle in her body tensed to the point of almost pain as she balanced on the razor’s edge of orgasm, not sure whether to lean into it or away, hunching even further over the sink, practically the whole of her upper body resting in the basin, the ends of her hair skimming the surface of the sudsy water. 

“Fuck, _enough_ ,” she insisted finally in a gasp, legs shaking, pushing him away enough to stand upright, to stand on her own. “You have to…I need you to fuck me, please.” _Need_. It really was, was this all-consuming need, this tempest, sweeping them both up and driving them mad, driving them beyond reason, beyond themselves. 

He stood, pulling her in tight, pulling her flush to him, again, palming her breasts. “You want me to fuck you, huh, baby?” he weaved fingers into her hair, turning her head to breathe this against her lips, and she could _taste_ herself in the sibilance of that breath. There was something about it that was so unbelievably wicked, so devastatingly hot, that a pang resounded between her legs, a hard knock like she was gearing up to come anyway, untouched.

“ _Yes_ ,” she practically hissed. 

She could hear his hands on his belt, then, followed by the resonant friction of his zipper going down. Heard the sound of him hunting down the condom in his wallet, rolling it on. Then felt the spongy, flared head of his cock, sweeping up between her legs, lining up against her entrance, angling to push inside of her. Her palms slapped down onto the edge of the sink basin, fingers digging into the porcelain, a death grip, as he eased forward, taking it slow, persuading the resistance of her body to give, to accept his.

He reached down to rub at her clit as he penetrated her, blunt fingertips rough and demanding, seeming to insist. It was way too much sensation, grating and nervy, but got her there, nonetheless, right to that guttural precipice. But he stopped, just then, like he could sense it, still pushing into her, like there was no end to either of them. He reached her end before his own, grinding right up against her cervix, which made her arch forward, uncomfortable.

He pressed down gently between her shoulder blades to bend her farther forward, to get her to arch her back, to stick out her behind, widen her stance to make more room for him between her hips. The angle was distinctly different, even with so minute a change, and it was _electric_ , made her jaw drop open as though she’d been burned. 

Did she revel in this to an unhealthy degree, she wondered, letting him fuck her body and black out her mind to pure, nothingness bliss? She was fairly certain she did, fairly certain she would live in this exact, vacant space forever if she could, feeling nothing but his body driving its way into hers, thinking of nothing but the way she _wanted_ him, letting his desire for her lick like flames across her until she was totally consumed. She wanted that, wanted him to consume her like a lit match, until nothing remained in his hands but ash. 

She was so _wet_ , the muscles of her wrapped around him, firm but yielding, clenching in their own fluttery, concentric rhythm as he pushed into her, pulled back. She was going to come, just about to tilt headfirst into it, and they could both feel it. He was murmuring against her ear, “ _Atta girl, come on, sweetheart…_ ”

But she wouldn’t, couldn’t give in, just yet, to the magnificent, shimmering unknown. She threw her ass back against his hips, gasping at the sharpness of the sensation as he bottomed out, but didn’t stop, not even when it hurt, when the orgasm she’d been chasing receded, and the fullness, the feeling of him inside her, reaching the end of her like a punch, was all that remained. 

She reached down to take one of his hands in hers as he fucked her, to bring it up to her own throat, coaxing his fingers into a manacle there, his middle finger and thumb pressing into either side of her esophagus, her breath catching just there, beneath his fingers, fluttering, like a moth caught in a jar. 

In that moment she was in her body but not, he was Peña but was not, and she could feel, as though they were there, too, somewhere between Peña’s fingers and her throat, Alejandro’s thicker, rougher fingers, gripping her esophagus tighter, until her head spun and black spots migrated across her field of vision, until every pulse of her heartbeat came as a surprise, as a gift. _This_ was what she wanted, in the darkest, most awful part of her, what she was really chasing, to put her life into his hand, to have him hand it back to her or withdraw it at will. It was freeing, somehow, that lack of control – something Alejandro had taught her, over the years, to savor, to roll around on her tongue like hard candy, to swallow down.

As she coaxed Peña’s grip to tighten, the blood in her body slowed, and it was like she could feel everything in a more complete detail, could capture every dust mote surrounding them, drifting across her skin, every throb of her heart in her chest, every answering knock of his pulse rising to meet hers. She could almost reach that shimmering, perfect place, where the sun, moon, and stars were blotted out, where the perfect veil of the sky, in its utter darkness, fell like a whisper of silk across her face, to drape her eyes, to blind her completely. 

But Peña’s grip eased as she took her hand away, so that he cradled her throat in his hand, softly, a lesser sensation, but a good one nonetheless, especially as the orgasm, twice denied, roared over her, refusing to again be pushed aside, sweeping her up and practically splintering her apart, an atomic frission, so that she might’ve sobbed, had she had the breath to do so. 

The spots in her eyes were blinked away, as were the gathering tears, as she ground back into his lap, hips winding, sinuous as a snake, grinding every last unctuous sweet contraction out of the orgasm. Then he seized her hips, held her still to seek his own end, her ass pressed tight against his lap, her hair clenched up in his fist as he leaned in over her, driving into her, hips stuttering as he finally came, as deep inside of her as he could possibly get without pushing his way through her. 

As they drew apart, a miraculous beast that had become one made into two again, spliced, she felt a pensive unrest, a heaviness in her chest that made her sag, breathless, on the edge of the sink for quite some time, contemplating, brows drawn down together, knit in consternation as he rested against the opposite countertop, panting.

It seemed they were trapped in a loop; cursed, confined to it – cars on a track. Their behaviors were predetermined, set out for them, like they were merely playing roles, reading from a script. She would turn wrathful on a dime, tempestuous as the sea, and he would not react – would not and could not be moved by the uncertain tides she found herself swept up in. He would placate and cajole and win her back over, and the gale-force of her rage would exhaust itself, dying down to nothing in an even more unpredictable instant. And then they would fuck. 

It was all well and good, really. Maybe that was why they kept at it – because it was _so good_ in the end. But was it any way to conduct a life? She questioned the appeal near-constantly. Why couldn’t she turn him off of her? Why was she so determined to? What did he even see in her? She guessed maybe it was easy to get addicted to the chaos – wasn’t it just like a drug?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took forever. I've been caught up with job-searching which is exhausting and unfun and spirit-killing, so I haven't really felt like writing 😅
> 
> Hope y'all enjoyed. As always, would love to hear from you.


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